Design News Aggregator
Last Updated: December 31, 2025
A news aggregator is a platform that collects news articles from multiple sources and presents them in a unified, personalized feed for users.
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The core idea is to save users the hassle of visiting dozens of individual news websites by bringing all relevant content to one place. The system must continuously crawl or receive content from publishers, deduplicate similar stories, rank them by relevance, and serve personalized feeds to millions of users.
Popular Examples: Google News, Flipboard, Apple News, Feedly, Reddit (for link aggregation)
This system design problem touches on many interesting challenges: web crawling at scale, content deduplication using hashing or embeddings, real-time trend detection, personalization algorithms, and handling traffic spikes during breaking news events.
There's no single "right" answer, which makes it perfect for exploring trade-offs.
In this chapter, we will explore the high-level design of a news aggregator.
Lets start by clarifying the requirements: