Google Now used to be really useful. It used to be so good that I only used Google Now Launcher on every phone because I needed to have Google Now just a swipe away on my home screen. Any other launcher felt like it was keeping me disconnected from information that I relied on every day. As we turned the calendar over to 2018, and just spent a week at CES 2018 seeing a huge emphasis on Google Assistant, it looks like Google's happy to let the traditional Google Now feature set — aka the "feed" — wither and die. In the past six months, Google Now has gone from a must-have feature to something I have stopped looking at regularly and even forgotten about for days at a time. It's no longer helpful, insightful or useful. Verizon is offering the Pixel 4a for just $10/mo on new Unlimited lines

Every morning, I used to unlock my phone, swipe to the right on my home screen and scroll through Google Now. I'd get updates on the weather, traffic, sports scores, upcoming calendar events, reminders about important emails and more. Throughout the day, when something was really important, I'd get a notification telling me about it — things like a stark change in the weather, an accident on my route to an appointment or breaking news. Google Now used to be the start of my daily routine; now it's an afterthought, at best. Now, my engagement with Google Now (ahem, feed) is sporadic and mostly disappointing. Swiping over on my home screen today shows me ... just a bunch of poorly-targeted news stories. Some based on things I like, others perhaps tangentially so, and many that are clearly jumping out on a limb to show me what's "trending" even though I have no interest in it. How did the once-wonderful Google Now turn into the same annoying throwaway feature as Samsung's Flipboard Briefing and HTC's News Republic in BlinkFeed? Google Now no longer shows me a single piece of information on appointments, calendar events, commute times or anything of the sort. I rarely get reminders for upcoming events or bills or other information from Gmail. There's one small card with upcoming weather, but that's just about the easiest possible thing to show and is available anywhere.

A subset of these things has been moved behind an "upcoming" button — one that's found in different places depending on your phone and launcher — and even in here I don't get the same great layout of up-to-date information at a glance that I once had. It's not even close, actually. This was the reason to use Google Now, and it's relegated to a second press and a different interface, entirely removed from the spontaneity and immediacy of being right there next to my main home screen. The useful notifications, too, have disappeared. At best I'll get a reminder about a sports game starting or a big drop in a stock ticker I've searched. Sigh. What the hell is Google doing with the Google Now feed? Ignoring it, as far as I can tell.