
Show HN: News geolocation website - zack2018
The idea:
The idea is to create a news aggregator that geolocates the news, it analyses the news and displays an article on a street&#x2F;city&#x2F;region (location in general) if it is mentioned in that article. The website will later give you notifications about what is mentioned in the news nearby.
The current situation of the project:<p>For now I have a minimum viable product, I have the website up and running that shows how the news will be displayed on a map.<p>What I am asking:<p>It will be really very nice of you if you can give me feedback, any feedbacks even negative ones are really more than appreciated. I know there are many bugs, bad design, lack of content but the question I am asking you is would you use such a website&#x2F;mobile app if it existed? Do you like the idea? Do you think it is worth it if I finish building such a website?<p>Here is the link to the website:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toperudite.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toperudite.com&#x2F;</a><p>Here is the link to the newsmap:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toperudite.com&#x2F;pages&#x2F;news&#x2F;newsmap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.toperudite.com&#x2F;pages&#x2F;news&#x2F;newsmap</a><p>Please don&#x27;t hesitate to fill the following survey (it takes less than 3 minutes)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;forms&#x2F;d&#x2F;e&#x2F;1FAIpQLSe9q_0roqwtipe4KLyRJ3lR1vVVHcYwuL6eRBr88G4qd-Z-qg&#x2F;viewform?c=0&amp;w=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;forms&#x2F;d&#x2F;e&#x2F;1FAIpQLSe9q_0roqwtipe4KLyR...</a><p>Here is a link to a slack channel :
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join.slack.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;toperuditebetatesters&#x2F;shared_invite&#x2F;enQtNDAyNjQzODgyMDE3LWVhNmZlOTNiYjBkMzJlYWJmNzRiYmExMjIyMmNiYWMxOGU4ZmVlZTNlZWJiZmRkODIwZmU1YTJhYWRmY2FkNTQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join.slack.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;toperuditebetatesters&#x2F;shared_invite...</a><p>Here is a quick youtube video
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CrwvY049ipE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CrwvY049ipE</a><p>Thank you very much for your time :)
======
nkozyra
I had a startup that built almost exactly the same thing in 2009 (at the peak
of 'hyperlocal' hype), so I have some advice. We ended up creating branded
widgets for partners and attempted to monetize with advertising.

1\. Your biggest problem is going to be acquiring audience; 'if you build it,
they will come' is probably not going to play out unless you offer something
above and beyond a typical aggregation web site.

2\. Consider the utility of granular location-specific news. For many users
what you will be showing is either very little content (because there isn't
any) or content from a larger geographic region. At that point you have to ask
who your audience is and what you provide to them over a bigger regional news
source.

3\. Keeping up with available sources will be a big challenge. Remember, if
you're just aggregating from the big sources, you're not providing much; the
appeal to an aggregator is that it gets and filters everything. If you have to
go to another source as a user, there's no point in using this site.

4\. The site looks pretty bare-bones. It could use some design help across the
board.

5\. The 'secret sauce' of a site like this is actually _not_ aggregation and
automation ... it's curation. If you read 100,000 RSS feeds (if and where you
can even find them these days!) you still need to separate the wheat from the
chaff. That's why Reddit works - it's effectively a user-curated aggregate
site that leverages a scoring algorithm to (ostensibly) bring the best stuff
to the top.

Edit: Forgot one of the biggest challenges. I don't know how you're doing your
address extraction, but one of the toughest things we ran into were false
positives. Articles that reference a location which we geocode but really
weren't _about_ that location. So you'll analyze a whole story (which can get
very computationally expensive) and find 4 locations:

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, D.C. Washington Zimbabwe

Now this story is about the Zimbabwe ambassador having a meeting with the
president. Two of those addresses are where the story is, two probably aren't
(Washington would probably not be geocoded to D.C.). So you file the story in:

Washington, D.C. Washington, USA Zimbabwe

Now you've just got noise. NLP can help but it's not enough - you will mis-
geolocate this story. When that happens a lot the results are not reliable
and, again, your potential audience does not see the utility.

Anyway, best of luck.

~~~
mtmail
As somebody coming from geocoding background parsing places from full text
will be a huge challenge. Hardly a word that isn't also a location. (There's a
state in Turkey called Batman).

~~~
zack2018
Indeed it's one of the most difficult challenges I am facing, the solution
would be to give the power to the users so that they can discard such parsing.
But first I have to ensure that there are people who might be interested in
using the solution, it's the phase I am in right now (trying to validate the
concept), thanks for the feedback :)

------
rjmunro
Many things don't happen at a point, they happen in an area, e.g. if something
is relevant to France as a whole, don't show it as happening in Paris, use
something to indicate a bounding box or radius which the story is centred on.

If something happens in Paris, show it in Paris, not in some random particular
location in the middle of Paris, unless you know that it really happened at
that exact location.

See this: [https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-
turn...](https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-
random-kansas-f-1793856052) for the kind of issue you can cause.

~~~
zack2018
I see your point, it's something listed in my list of bugs to fix, for now i
am still in an idea validation phase where I want to validate the concept
before committing more time to it, but I agree, this should definitely be
fixed first :)

------
jillesvangurp
I built something like this a few years ago. We ultimately did not really
succeed but I think this could be potentially still very interesting.

Location is interesting when you combine it with time. News archives contain a
lot of valuable content that would be interesting in the context of a
location. For example, I live in Berlin and when we started digging around in
archives from news papers, we found all these gems about David Bowie visiting
certain bars, being on certain streets, etc. This is interesting to people in
that area, years after the fact but not necessarily for people outside that
area. Just having a historical view on a place via the things that people
published about it is interesting.

Our problem at the time was coming up with enough of an MVP to convince users
and investors. One thing we explored was using nlp to extract clues about
location references from the text. This is surprisingly hard but not
impossible. People use a lot of ambiguous language to refer to locations but
taken together you can sometimes deduce correctly that people are referring to
a street in Prenzlauerberg (a neighborhoud) in Berlin (the capital of germany,
not the village near Bremen). This is of course flaky. The good news is some
content is actually geotagged, which makes this easier. However, we found a
lot of low quality geotagging as well.

~~~
zack2018
It is definitely something I will explore if I continue the project, combining
time and location. I agree it is difficult to find locations for text but
nowadays the NLP algorithms are more powerful than ever before so it is
feasible :)

~~~
jillesvangurp
The problem is the references to locations in text are ambiguous. There are
many places called paris (most of which outside of France). Many streets
called Main street, etc. Also lots of articles mention several locations. Then
there are lots of informal names for neighborhoods, people being a bit loose
with boundaries, etc. You can usually guess the city but getting from there to
e.g. street level or neighborhood level is a lot harder. Anyway, good luck.

------
SyneRyder
I think it's an interesting idea, but I'm rarely interested in news about a
specific location (except when a particular incident / tragedy has happened).
For local news, I tend to go read my local newspaper websites, and Google News
already aggregates local articles anyway for me in their Local News section.

However - I am looking for a Google News replacement, as it keeps showing me
gossip, entertainment and snarky news, no matter how many times I click "fewer
stories like this". They used to have a feature where you could block news
providers (eg never show me news from TMZ), and also choose my preferred news
sources (eg I could choose The Verge & Bloomberg) and it would rank their
version of the story highest. That was very useful while it worked. You could
also add topics that you were interested in, so if I added "Nine Inch Nails,
Trent Reznor", it would rank news stories about Nine Inch Nails more highly so
that I would see them. (I would really like to be able to blacklist
topics/keywords too.)

If somebody made a news aggregator like this, I'd love to switch away from
Google News.

~~~
guybedo
Hey, i'm a little late but i've been working on something that you might find
interesting. I've been using RSS readers for quite some time but wanted to
have an app that would combine rss feeds and GoogleNews-like news aggregation.
So i built [https://aktu.io](https://aktu.io), It's a mix between a RSS reader
and a news aggregator, so you can think of it as an all-in-one Google Reader +
Google News web app. It's still an early version and doesn't have all the
features of Google News (yet) but i would love to have your feedback !

------
jpiburn
Very cool idea. I haven't seen it mentioned in here, but the GDELT project is
something you might be able to use

[https://www.gdeltproject.org/](https://www.gdeltproject.org/)

~~~
zack2018
I didn't know about the GDELT project this could be very useful for my
project, much appreciated :)

------
mflare
Nice work. I also started a very very similar news aggregation service a few
months ago, which extracts locations from news articles and shows the
headlines on a map. [http://mapflare.com](http://mapflare.com)

As other comments already mentioned, there are many false positive locations,
such as names of persons, organizations, chemical elements or even normal
verbs and nouns. There exist for example places named "Robin Hood".

Took me some time to realize that i should not limit the text extraction to
locations, but also focus on the recognition of other entities (persons,
organizations,..) in order to filter out the ambiguous names.

------
mongol
The idea is a very good one. Thought about it just the other day. The news in
Sweden just now are overwhelmed about report about forest fires, but very hard
to follow as most of them are in "obscure" locations. People that are
concerned about fires in familiar neighbourhoods need to search the locations
to see if they are close to the locations they are concerned about etc. I
think there is much promise in the idea to provide a map interface to news of
this kind. The regular media is in any case not doing a great job about it.

But also many challenges. I noticed in the past days that the accuracy of
locations in the news is much lacking. Location names are not unique so an
automatic approach is likely to fail.

------
PaulRobinson
I am yet another person who built something like this some years ago (2006, I
think).

The idea is OK, but you're missing something important. People don't care
about local news, they care about relevant news. Some news is relevant to me
even though it's happening on the other side of the World. Some news is only
relevant to me because it affects my next door neighbour (who knew he was into
_that_ , huh?).

You're going to need to spend a lot of time fixing up the design as it is
right now, and audience building is going to be so, so hard in this climate.

Good luck, but you've a way to go.

~~~
zack2018
Thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated :)

------
mrweasel
It doesn't really seem to work. The newsmap doesn't have any content.

Also it's a little strange that you're only able to search for streets, not
general areas or cities.

~~~
zack2018
Thanks for the feedback, I will add the cities/ general areas, it's necessary
indeed. And sorry for the inconvenience, there was a problem with the
database, everything is back to normal now.

------
fongelias
I think small visual changes in text size and formatting can make a big
difference. Like just making the titles of articles bold, and putting them
above their sources.

There is a bug for me where if I click the language change to english, then
set the location to english, the "hours ago" section still shows french.

This is a really cool project! Hope you post more updates on HN as you go.

~~~
zack2018
Thank you for the feedback, much appreciated :) :)

------
mapster
Great start.

I had a similar MVP in 2010 with the intent on building a curated news
aggregator for sales territories. Once you define your geographic area
(zipcodes/states/draw etc) and choose keywords and/or topics, your news feed
will include any local or AP story that includes these keywords and geotagged
within your territory.

------
carraragiovanni
Very similar idea to what I was developing some time ago:

[http://www.theheretimes.com](http://www.theheretimes.com)

about: [http://www.theheretimes.com/about](http://www.theheretimes.com/about)

~~~
zack2018
very similar indeed

------
lunulata
A lot of news sources have a large part of their media already devoted to
local news. I don't see this providing much value on top of that. I think your
engineering work here is great, but business wise I think you should pivot.

~~~
zack2018
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated :)

------
personlurking
> would you use such a website/mobile app if it existed?

Geolocated "news" is used in larger Brazilian cities but it's regarding stay
bullets and robberies (eg. Fogo Cruzado, Onde Tem Tiroteio, Onde Fui Roubado).
So there are some emergency use cases, but I'm unable to think of another use
case where I might want to see the news mapped, as the core idea.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-security-
app/brazi...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-security-app/brazil-
apps-track-gunfire-as-rio-de-janeiro-violence-spikes-idUSKBN19P2C3)

~~~
zack2018
Thanks for the feedback, it can be very useful in case of an emergency indeed.

------
krn
Related: [http://eventregistry.org/](http://eventregistry.org/) (B2B SaaS)

~~~
zack2018
True, thanks :)

------
tenkabuto
The idea is interesting. B2B: I think that historical trends, especially on a
seasonal basis might be quite useful for news and travel agencies, real estate
offices, and general economic analysis.

~~~
zack2018
thanks for the feedback, those are very good ideas much appreciated :)

------
ljsocal
I like the idea. It would be great if a user could help the site improve its
results for that user by, say, removing news about local hockey games that I
don’t and will never be interested in.

~~~
zack2018
True, adding personnalisation of the news depending on the profile of the user
is in my list of things to do :)

------
mipmap04
I like this idea a lot, but not able to check it out due to 502 errors. Would
like to see it when it's a bit more built out. What are you using for address
extraction?

~~~
zack2018
I use machine learning for address extraction. Very sorry for the
inconvenience, the website is back online

~~~
mipmap04
The address extraction piece would make an awesome API that you could charge
for if it's effective. I imagine a lot of aggregators would pay for something
like that.

~~~
zack2018
True, thanks for the feedback :)

------
kowdermeister
I don't see any content, is the backend dead?

[https://imgur.com/a/BWpvBdOq](https://imgur.com/a/BWpvBdOq)

~~~
probably_wrong
I don't see any content either, but just wanted to point out that your link
gives me a 404.

~~~
kowdermeister
Meh, probably I didn't save it.

------
pgt
I'm getting a 502.5 process failure. HN death hug?

~~~
zack2018
Very sorry for the inconvenience, the website is back online

------
Firegarden
Hey Zack, Can we talk a little further about this offline? You can reach me
via email at Firegarden.

\- Rob

------
hugecannon
> England

Union Jack Flag

------
Kagerjay
Sites broken for me

~~~
zack2018
Very sorry for the inconvenience, the website is back online

------
paidleaf
Rather than news aggregation on a map/location, I'd rather have news
aggregation per event across countries/regions/etc.

For example, Trump-Putin meeting is an event. I'd like news aggregation on
this event on what every corporate and independent news publication across the
world is saying. Currently, I am only able to get US/British news viewpoints
or angles and I have to work ridiculous hard ( google search is terrible now )
to find reporting on other nations/viewpoints. I was curious how the chinese,
arabs, israelis, indians, south americans, etc were reporting on the story
because having been to europe and asia, I know that news is not the same
everywhere. One good thing about traveling.

Google news used to do something like this until they were forced to limit it
to corporate news and regions.

~~~
zack2018
That was the original idea, it seemed too complicated to do at the beginning
but now after working some months on the idea, I think it's feasible, I will
add this feature in my future surveys to see who might be interested, thanks
for the feedback, much appreciated :)

