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Comment by jtokoph | Hacker News Reader

I've had to disable Google Now in Chrome on my machines.

I check the Chicago weather where my parents live, once. Now I get constant notifications about the current weather in Chicago.

I looked up a sporting event score for a friend and now Google thinks I need to know the status of every game for a team I don't follow.

I couldn't find any way to tell Now that I didn't want those specific notifications and the only way to disable it was to turn it off completely via chrome://flags

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I haven't used Microsoft Cortana, so I'm not sure if it's any good, but they reportedly get one thing Google completely misses: people want a personal assistant, not a creepy stalker. A personal assistant takes care of the kinds of tasks you tell him or her to handle; a stalker does things he or she thinks you want. Big difference. My personal assistant would schedule meetings at work. My stalker would send my mistress flowers for her birthday.

There's supposed to be a little menu you can bring up on any card where you can tweak the settings. You didn't get one?

(Note: I'm not trying to blame the user here -- if the menu isn't discoverable, that's Google's problem to fix.)

It's the standard hamburger style menu found across android. Maybe it would be difficult if it wasn't in every Google android app.

This is reminding me of tabs for gmail. They'll figure out for you what you want to see, you don't get to tell them.

If you drag a miscategorized email over to its proper tab, GMail learns from the experience.

Perhaps this fact needs to be made more discoverable.

But I want a tab for something like "work-related emails", and there's no way to do that.

That would be an awesome feature.

I had the same annoying outcome as well. You can turn off just notifications from Google Now by clicking on the bell icon in your menubar (if you're on a Mac - do the equivalent on Windows/Linux) then clicking on the settings (gear icon) and then in there you can untick Google Now

There is no "bell" icon in my menu bar. I get notified about the weather about once every 15 mins :(

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=360199

I had the same problem. Go here and disable it:

chrome://flags/#enable-google-now

Thanks for the flags tip!

chrome://chrome-urls/ for all the urls.

I had the same problem - I was able to fix it by going to about:flags and disabling 'enable experimental ui for notifications'. This prevents chrome from using the native osx notification center, and instead uses a bell icon in the menubar. It also fixed the weather notifications issue for me.

Well, I don't know how Google Now works but I presume there is a machine learning component in there and it should get better as you have lot more data to train the model. So, may be its early to dismiss such a product very soon.

Just swipe it to the side a few times and it will be gone.

This is on my desktop/laptop. I have chrome installed on iOS but no android devices. I have set to see Now appear within Chrome on my iPhone.

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