Many weren't happy with the change that shows recommended sites and articles in Chrome 54 - Android Police team members included - and while I personally do not mind them, I can see why you would prefer not to have Google recommend stuff you may not like.

In light of this, Chrome developer evangelist François Beaufort has come to the rescue. A new Chrome internals page, in the latest builds of Chrome Dev, allows modification of the recommended sites and articles, at least somewhat. chrome://ntp-tiles-internals controls what is shown on the page, with an update button to update the popular sites and function to change the region you get sites from (for example, I'm in the UK so I see the UK versions of sites). Together with the flags to turn off things on the new tab page, this gives pretty granular control over it. However, you can't remove tabs from appearing in popular sites using chrome://ntp-tiles-internals, although you can do this on the new tab page itself by long clicking on the item.

Anyhow, it's interesting to see how Chrome works under the hood, and it's always good to know that these things can be tweaked and played with. Hit the source link to see more information directly from François.

Source: +François Beaufort