Show HN: Newshound – a news aggregator for daily news from around the world

https://www.newshound.co/

17 27 8 years ago

Hi, Newshound developer here.

My friend Freida and I are excited to launch Newshound, a web-based news aggregator. About a year ago, we started talking about creating a news aggregator that would show multiple sides to the same story with no tracking and no ads. We scratched our itch and soon had a prototype going. We shared it with friends and family and got a positive response. We have released it publicly today in the hope that others would also find it useful.

Our home page has a short tour of the features: https://www.newshound.co/

The U.S. edition of our daily news aggregator is here: https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/. It has become an indispensable part of our daily lives, and I hope it becomes that for you too.

Our blog post has a more extensive description of the features along with a future roadmap: https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/launching-web-based-n...

We're hoping to publish a series of engineering blog posts that would reveal the technology under the hood. Here is a short summary of what's coming up: https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/under-hood-newshounds...

We'd love to hear back from you. Thanks for looking and I'll be glad to answer any questions.

yorwba• 8 years ago

I like your site. It's not busy with distractions and works flawlessly without JS.

Unfortunately, my opinion is probably irrelevant, because I'm not a potential user. I'm simply not that interested in news (yes, I realize the irony of saying that on Hacker News) and looking at your headlines confirmed to me that I'm not really missing anything.

I do have an suggestion for your "In the News" sidebar: some entries (e.g. "U.S" and "President Trump") are likely to be there constantly. Maybe it would be more informative if you adjust for topics that are mentioned unusually frequently compared to their base rate. Additionally, that list begs for each item to link to a list of relevant stories.

Oh, and the link to your engineering blog's RSS feed in the announcement post needs an initial / to make it root-relative.

3into10power5• 8 years ago

Can you tell what you use to source the news articles? Any API or just scraping? Cool site otherwise. May be you want to add personalization based on persons interests/needs etc.

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

I like your site. It's not busy with distractions and works flawlessly without JS. Thank you! We've been watching recent website design trends with something approaching horror. (See this excellent discussion last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18284910) We decided that our website would reflect our belief that HTML should be rendered on the server side and CSS should be used to make it look pretty; JS strictly for
Unfortunately, my opinion is probably irrelevant, because I'm not a potential user. I'm simply not that interested in news (yes, I realize the irony of saying that on Hacker News) and looking at your headlines confirmed to me that I'm not really missing anything. You're not alone. Many people have had this reaction.
I do have an suggestion for your "In the News" sidebar: some entries (e.g. "U.S" and "President Trump") are likely to be there constantly. Yes, President Trump does stay have a tendency to stay in the headlines constantly. Last week's issue of The Economist concluded that his disruptive approach is working well abroad and that "unpredictability has some advantages". https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/10/27/trump-is-... The New York Times concluded 2 days ago that "the president has sought to seize the national stage in the last stretch of the [mid-terms] campaign". https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/us/politics/midterm-elect...
Maybe it would be more informative if you adjust for topics that are mentioned unusually frequently compared to their base rate. That's a really good idea. Let me chew over it and see how it pans out.
Additionally, that list begs for each item to link to a list of relevant stories. Ah, you've guessed at what we're working on right now! That's right, we're working on search results for news archives, with stories ranked by relevance and displayed in a reverse chronological timeline. We're aiming to make search fast and scalable using the free text search capabilities of Postgres 11 but if anyone wants to point us towards a better approach, we would welcome it.
Oh, and the link to your engineering blog's RSS feed in the announcement post needs an initial / to make it root-relative. Thank you for pointing that out. It's fixed now https://www.newshound.co/blog/20181101/under-hood-newshounds... and the feed URL is the correct one: https://www.newshound.co/blog/engineering/feed. We hope you subscribe!

prions• 8 years ago

I like the simple layout, but the topic aggregation algorithm could use some adjustment.

Frozen 2 is in both Top Stories and Business, but not in Entertainment. There's some objectivity at play here, but I'd rather see articles about movies only in Entertainment, with the ability to not see that topic.

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

I like the simple layout, but the topic aggregation algorithm could use some adjustment. Frozen 2 is in both Top Stories and Business, but not in Entertainment.

I agree that in this case our algorithm that classifies news stories into sections has not done the best job possible. We'll definitely look into fine tuning it for better classification.

There's some objectivity at play here, but I'd rather see articles about movies only in Entertainment, with the ability to not see that topic.

Do you mean you would like to be able to personalize the page to completely eliminate some sections like Entertainment? Or do you mean some topics within a section, for example "crypto" within Technology?

leephillips3• 8 years ago

This looks great, and comes at a perfect time for me, as I was looking for a replacement for the supremely annoying Google News on my phone. You've made all the right decisions, eliminating the misfeatures of Google and other news aggregators.

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

You've made all the right decisions

Thank you, it means a lot to us to hear that because we've largely gone against the current trends.

eliminating the misfeatures of Google and other news aggregators

Just curious, what misfeature do you think Google News and other news aggregators have that annoy you so supremely?

bradknowles• 8 years ago

The aggregation system you’re using is pretty good, but it still sometimes misses and groups stories together that are not related.

For myself, I’d actually like to see the ability to customize the news sources — maybe bring in some sources you’re not already using, and leave out some that you are. I like the way that partial.press does this, at least for the news sources they do use.

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

* The aggregation system you’re using is pretty good, but it still sometimes misses and groups stories together that are not related.*

Yes, I agree. The aggregation system works fast at scale but needs fine-tuning for accuracy. This is very much something we are working on right now.

For myself, I’d actually like to see the ability to customize the news sources — maybe bring in some sources you’re not already using, and leave out some that you are.

Personalization of news sources is definitely on our roadmap. Can you cite some examples of sources that we're not already using? We'd love to increase the diversity of new sources to bring in different perspectives on the same issue.

Fjolsvith• 8 years ago

Looks like the site has a liberal slant.

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

We are aiming to have a diverse set of news sources. Would you like to name some that you feel should be included?

masonic4• 8 years ago

Have you checked trademark issues? The Mercury-News had an article retrieval service called Newshound.

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

The San Jose Mercury News launched its Newshound service in late 1994 and closed it down about 5 years later under the direction of its new owner, Knight-Ridder, who wanted to be a pure print play versus embracing news online. https://archives.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_s...

I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that a trademark must be in active, continuous use after registration to be valid. https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-maintaining-trademark-regis...

julienreszka• 8 years ago

Not responsive

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

Not responsive

Sorry to hear that the page's responsive design layout did not work out for your device. Would it be possible for you to link to a screenshot so we can fix the bug?

MitchellCash• 8 years ago

Nice work releasing!

There were two things I thought could use some improvement.

First were the two images of a list of hyperlinks that look clickable. I tried clicking on the links to no avail thinking they were broken, only to realise I was clicking on an image. The two images in particular are the News Sections and Newsmakers images on the homepage.

The second point was that I initially couldn't figure out how to access the service. I had to click on "Read the U.S. edition" which sounded like a sub-section of the site, not the main news aggregator service. What threw me off was the website slogan of "Daily news from around the world", I was trying to find the rest the news, not just the U.S. edition. If this is the only option right now, it could possibly just say "Read the News". Take this with a grain of salt though as I am not a U.S. citizen, so I might not be your current target audience right now.

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

Thank you for the feedback!

First were the two images of a list of hyperlinks that look clickable. I tried clicking on the links to no avail thinking they were broken, only to realise I was clicking on an image. The two images in particular are the News Sections and Newsmakers images on the homepage.

We heard this privately from a couple of other people as well. We'll definitely look into making the Features section a lot less ambiguous.

The second point was that I initially couldn't figure out how to access the service.

Yes, I agree that we haven't made it very prominent that the U.S. edition news is at https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/.

I was trying to find the rest the news, not just the U.S. edition.

The U.S. edition actually has a World news section that has a comprehensive collection of global news stories. https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/#news-section-world

I am not a U.S. citizen, so I might not be your current target audience right now.

We're looking for feedback from non-U.S. citizens on which other news editions they would like to see. For example, we've come up with Canada, UK, Europe, Africa, India and Japan as geographical areas that could have news editions but we'd rather work on what our readers want than what we think they want.

masonic4• 8 years ago

There's some redundancy; topics aren't being combined uniformly. For example, today has the story about Facebook killing 115 accounts in two separate batches[0]. (Meanwhile, I don't understand why killing a tiny fraction of their accounts is even "news".)

[0] https://www.newshound.co/editions/en-us/#news-section-politi...

bruce_lipshitz13• 8 years ago

There's some redundancy; topics aren't being combined uniformly. For example, today has the story about Facebook killing 115 accounts in two separate batches

Yes, the topic aggregation algorithm is not completely fine tuned as of now. (See prion's comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359975). It has false positives (combining news stories that really don't belong together) as well as false negatives (not combining news stories that belong together).

We are working on fine tuning the algorithm every day based on incoming news stories. If you stick around, you'll see a gradual improvement.

Thank you as always for your detailed feedback. It's not everyday that one has the privilege to interact with a greybeard.

Show HN: Newshound – a news aggregator for daily news from around the world

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