Being pro-active about telling it which topics or sources you don't like helps a lot. My only wish is to say that I don't like a specific article. Often I get an article on a topic from a source I generally like but the specific article is junk.
When the last election's campaigns were ramping up, I went into my Google interests sections and made every effort to tell it I was disinterested in politics and the 2 big names. I only started getting MORE political content until it overwhelmed my feed. For a few months I tried swiping it all away whenever I checked, but seemed to get zero response. I then started telling it I'm not interested in any stories from any sources that report anything political. In other words, I blocked the mainstream media. It got significantly better, but it still tries to shoehorn in a few articles on these topics by pulling from obscure local news outlets that are from the other side of the country.
I've tried that with politics and sports, but it seems to be incapable of understanding what you DO NOT want to see.
It seems to be much more concerned about false negatives than false positives, showing you more instead of less simply because some metrics (like regional popularity) indicates you might like it.
Are you logged in your google account while using google search? Also, do you often search using your phone?
It's been really accurate for me, providing news about things that are not especially "mainstream", like word embeddings, anything related to KDE or updates on games I'm currently playing. I do a lot of searches on my phone, maybe that's the reason.
Do you share your computer with other people - kids, significant other, other family members? I find that has really ruined google's ability to consistently suggest me useful things across its products. My 8 year old daughter has especially ruined youtube for me.
I tried autoplay one time then fell asleep. History showed me that it had been playing trump videos for 6 hours. Donald then followed me around for 2 months. (My hypothesis is that youtube is gradually changing all of us into ufologists.)
The trick seems to do some search query then click a lot of videos in the result. That seems to force a new hand.
Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am not interested in.
I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them were about sports, which is way off the mark for me.
Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular, or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google account?