Ask HN: What good alteratives are there to Google News? - cpncrunch
======
bradgessler
[https://legiblenews.com/](https://legiblenews.com/)

It scrapes headlines from Wikipedia once per day at 8p PST. It's encrypted.
There's no ads. It loads fast, as-in one request. Your activity isn't logged.

I built this because I got tired of all the shitty tricks news websites play:
obnoxious ads, "breaking news", auto-play videos, pumping megabytes of crap
into your browser, lack of privacy, and lack of citations.

Legible news is boring. It's non-addictive. If you click on a link you might
accidentally learn something about the historic context of a news story. I
don't log anything because I don't care. Daily headlines delivered in one HTTP
request (look at it in an inspector) over a CDN. It's fast. I hope you like
it, but if you don't no worries, I built it for myself.

~~~
Nothorized
Is the code open source ? I live in Europe, and it would be great if, with the
same product, we could choose the time at which we want the news to be
delivered, and the language in which we want it delivered.

~~~
bradgessler
Its not OSS at the moment.

I've thought a lot about this use case. My vision is that a few KB of text is
delivered once per day to whatever-device at a desired time. No more. No less.

What language and locale would you be interested in?

~~~
leipert
Both the English and the German wikipedia, maybe something along the lines of:

[https://legiblenews.com/?l=de,en](https://legiblenews.com/?l=de,en)

------
27182818284
I'll throw a vote out for the New York Times daily briefing:

The sample looks like [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/briefing/north-
korea-cnn-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/briefing/north-korea-cnn-
volvo.html)

It is exactly what it sounds like—a quick daily briefing of the most important
things that have happened over night—kinda as if you're the President.

There is a URL that you don't need to update each day to hit, but for the life
of me I can't remember it at the moment.

~~~
cel1ne
Is there a link I can bookmark to go there?

I don't use feeds or notifications but manual bookmarks so I can choose the
time of reading.

~~~
27182818284
I think [https://www.nytimes.com/briefing](https://www.nytimes.com/briefing)
was what I was thinking of. I kept trying different versions including the
word daily, but just briefing works.

~~~
cel1ne
Awesome, thank you.

------
scottdevries
I’m surprised Blendle ([https://blendle.com](https://blendle.com)) hasn’t been
mentioned yet - you end up paying a small amount for each article, but I’ve
found the quality of curation pretty decent, but not perfect yet.

You have to apply for beta access, but it didn’t take long for me to be
accepted in. It’s probably more of a marketing beta program, to feel
exclusive.

~~~
lisper
+1 from another happy blendle user.

Curation is a valuable service. It's worth paying for.

------
ptr_void
The daily hour-long version here is the only regular news I consume(minus
notify NYC RSS):
[https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/PBSNewsHour/videos)
I find them to be less jumpy than similar news sources, probably due to the
lack of incentives to bring in massive profit.

If I am interested in something specific/real time, I will open up google
news, reddit news, twitter, local news, web search, popular newspaper
sites(nytimes, washington post etc.) and/or other relevant places.

------
niko001
[http://www.leftrightcenter.io/](http://www.leftrightcenter.io/)

I'm working on an alternative to Google News that shows the same event from
multiple news outlets/perspectives so that you can draw your own conclusions.
Let me know what you think!

~~~
TulliusCicero
Interesting idea but the design right now is, well it feels like it's
assaulting my eyes. Looking it on a laptop right now and each story element is
just way too large. The font size is almost comical. The size of each story
should be cut down like 50-75% I think.

------
cpncrunch
Gives that google news is filled with spam
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14730945))
it would be useful if there was a good alternative.

------
frankydp
Should adjust this question to say desktop aggregation version, and I am
assuming this ASK is in response to the recent Google News redesign that
pretty much removed the desktop version of the site.

Apps and mobile is cool and all, but high density or high volume data
consumption is not the use case for those platforms.

~~~
cpncrunch
The redesign isnt an issue...works well enough on desktop. I just refuse to
use a news service where 50% or more of the health stories are viagra spam.
Completely unacceptable. Especially since people have been reporting it to
google for the past month. It makes me wonder about the quality of their
curation.

------
jryan49
I find
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events)
to have the most important things on it.

------
MikeGale
I haven't recently found a news organisation that is consistently rational and
has done their homework. Given that news is still worth reading, in
moderation.

I roll my own sources including: 1\. A variety of newsfeeds through a desktop
reader. (Can be improved by writing your own rating system.) 2\. A list of
news sources on a web page, this evolves. (Would also benefit from code that
throws out the things I'll never read.) 3\. Blendle. 4\. People I correspond
with (they dig out good stuff, I reciprocate). 5\. Less obvious (to some) news
sources like HN... are on that web page list. ...

Google used to do custom feeds defined by an arbitrary search string, that had
some power.

There are tools out there that help identify material worth reading (DNN's
etc.).

I find likes and dislikes are often valueless even if you "assume the
opposite".

Your most important weapon may be the realisation that most journalists are
under extreme pressure and don't do their job at even a basic level. Makes it
easier to quickly ignore the garbage..

~~~
Hnrobert42
I find the print version of The Week to be surprisingly consistent in their
balanced review of high quality news sources. Sadly, the online version is a
bit click-baity, but the print version is amazing.

~~~
epmaybe
Why is it that their Android app hasn't been updated in three years?

------
RachelF
Bing News is unfashionable, but it looks like old Google News:
[https://www.bing.com/news](https://www.bing.com/news)

~~~
cpncrunch
Initially Bing News looked good, but after using it there are a few issues:

\- Payday loan spam (two spams on the front page)

\- No way to customize your interests

\- Duplicated stories with near identical headlines appear from multiple
sources. This isn't usually an issue with Google.

------
lj3
A better question would be what good alternatives are there to news in
general. When I see the same headlines with the exact same wording across many
different news outlets, I begin to wonder why anybody trusts anything the
media has to say about anything.

~~~
Finnucane
Presumably a lot of stories are being run from wire services-AP and Reuters.
Most news organizations don't have resources to originate every story.

------
Yetanfou
Nextcloud [1] with the News [2] app. Feed it whatever RSS/Atom feeds you want
- which can include Google News feeds - and let it rip. You can read the feeds
in a browser or in one of the compatible apps [3] (14 of them are listed here,
there might be others).

[1] [https://nextcloud.com/](https://nextcloud.com/)

[2]
[https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news](https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news)

[3] [https://github.com/nextcloud/news#sync-
clients](https://github.com/nextcloud/news#sync-clients)

~~~
cpncrunch
Im looking for a curated major news service i.e. stories curated from various
major newspapers.

------
garyhost_
Why not use something like feedly, with your own rss feeds ?

~~~
smt88
I have (and still use) a feed reader, but it doesn't really replace Google
News. It's often helpful to have an algorithm tell you what's important on
other news sources you're not reading. It's also nice that it filters out a
lot of the noise/click-bait that all publishers use nowadays.

~~~
frankydp
Second this, in that I mostly don't want to maintain a current and relevant
RSS list of a size that I would want to have. RSS is also a firehose which can
be just as bad as a small list of sources.

------
vinc
I scrape Wikipedia[1] for my website[2] like another user from this thread,
it's pretty good to have a quick look at what happened during the day.

Then I check only the top news from some subreddits[3] and hackernews[4], and
I usually hide what I read to avoid seeing them again.

And if I need more I can get the headlines of major news websites[5].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/2017_Jul...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/2017_July_8)

[2]
[https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=wikipedia](https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=wikipedia)

[3]
[https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=reddit+science+environment+tim...](https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=reddit+science+environment+time:week+sort:top)

[4]
[https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=hackernews+time:week](https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=hackernews+time:week)

[5] [https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=newsapi+the-guardian-
uk](https://news.vinc.cc/search?q=newsapi+the-guardian-uk)

------
jerry40
I migrated to The Old Reader
([https://theoldreader.com](https://theoldreader.com)). I even tried to wirte
the emacs mode for it (just for education), but didn't manage to finish it yet
([https://github.com/jerry40/the-old-mode](https://github.com/jerry40/the-old-
mode)).

------
d0m
There's one thing on reddit called "multireddits" which is an aggregation of
multiple subreddits; so I picked my local news subreddits + world ones and
this is my daily news. I like it very much. Only complaint is that it seems to
show the same news multiple days in a row even though I "read" it already.

------
robert_jensen
I have been working on a news aggregator site-
[https://news.r1b.solutions/](https://news.r1b.solutions/) github-
[https://github.com/r1b/news-wires](https://github.com/r1b/news-wires)

~~~
r1b
FYI - this is my actual HN account. It seems that one of my..fans has created
another :)

Happy to answer any questions.

~~~
ycombinete
Very nice. Bookmarked.

------
donohoe
I've been using this mobile focused site:

[https://article.rocks](https://article.rocks)

It's a short digest of articles from a number of sources. It's not
specifically hard news but it covers important stories of the day and
interesting reads from across the web.

------
erik998
[http://foreignpolicy.com](http://foreignpolicy.com) is a good source... the
digital subscription is worth the price. You need to pay for good curation. I
like the links to source documents. They also provide names of officials. I
highly recommend.

[http://www.middleeasteye.net/](http://www.middleeasteye.net/) is another good
site. good analysis and helps me understand what is really going on. They link
to source documents. Very useful.

------
kripy
[https://www.allin.wtf/current-issue](https://www.allin.wtf/current-issue)

I wrote this as a daily briefing, also for myself. It scrapes around 45 sites
that I have handpicked. Links are ranked based on shares across social
platforms: the usual suspects.

I curate each issue based on what looks good each morning and send it out at
around 7am AEST.

I wrote more about it here: [https://www.kripy.com/alt-all-
in/](https://www.kripy.com/alt-all-in/).

------
unsigner
I usually don't want to be the wise-ass responding profoundly to a question
that was not asked, but I can't resist.

Ignore news and focus on things that are more important, like family, health
and work.

It's probably overall beneficial to have a rough idea what is going on in your
city, your nation and the world - in that order - but try to do it on a larger
timescale, rather than be a squirrel chasing the "news cycle" \- which is what
sites like Google News are geared towards.

------
40acres
Offtopic, but I've never found a newsfeed / RSS reader that compelling. After
a while you've subscribed to say many things that you don't want to (and
can't) spend the time required to catch up on everything.

Personally, I subscribe to one newspaper, watch one cable news network and
browse HackerNews and Reddit (HN trending upward vs. Reddit in recent months)
and listen to a few podcasts and I'm able to keep up with the world on a wide
range of topics.

------
f3nws
[http://www.f3nws.com](http://www.f3nws.com) \- Aggregates news from various
news sources and present a reading view.

[http://www.f3nws.com/mobile?amp](http://www.f3nws.com/mobile?amp) \- is the
fast mobile/AMP version of the same site.

[http://www.f3nws.com/feed](http://www.f3nws.com/feed) \- RSS Feed

~~~
gnicholas
Nice looking — what's the long-term plan on copyright? That is, if you get
big, won't publishers get angry that you're repurposing their content? In the
meantime, I'll give it a try.

~~~
f3nws
I'm working on a system that summarize a news. Not sure if it stand a chance
to get big as there are many sites like this, :P

------
sterban
[https://statesreport.com](https://statesreport.com) is a project I wrote as
an alternative.

------
petraeus
RSS feeds, I currently am subscribed to over 1200 feeds ranging from cooking,
to hunting, to bikes (motor and pedal), to fashion, arts, humanites,
economics, social science, world affairs, programming, finance, coupons,
hockey, china, you name the subject you are interested in and you can find
hundreds of fees for your preference.

Only sheep passively consume news as its fed to them.

------
nl
Is there actually interest in a site which does what Google News does, but
better (somehow?).

What exactly would people want to see different to Google News?

I've been mucking around with various things in this area for over 15 years
now, but I'm just not sure what is useful to others?

Please tell me, because I'd like to build it. Reply here or email or Twitter.

~~~
gmgarrison
I'm curious - do you mean you've been playing around with news aggregators for
15 years or something else?

I'm not the OP but there's clearly some pretty widespread dissatisfaction with
the current news production and consumption landscape. I think there's a huge
appetite for bias identification and noise identification and filtering. Given
that the idea of a "fact" is something the two main political parties cannot
agree on, it seems that's there a huge opportunity for someone/something to
come in and disrupt that.

~~~
nl
I've been writing code to do things in this area since 1999. I wrote a RSS
parser in Delphi in '99, was in the RSS/RDF/Atom wars, wrote a aggregator with
Bayesian filtering in 2003, and I'm one of the authors of the ROME Jave RSS
library. I'm currently running a research project in news event prediction and
detection.

I don't think anyone wants bias detection.. or maybe they do so that they can
only read things that they agree with?

------
mrfrasha
I'm trying to start a subreddit for twitter moments.

I think the moments format is really good for dispensing information quickly
and easily linking to more detailed information when needed.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/twittermoments/](https://www.reddit.com/r/twittermoments/)

------
mjfern
Check out [http://contentgems.com](http://contentgems.com). It's similar to
Google News but gives you more filtering options and ways to share content.

Disclaimer: I'm a cofounder.

Edit: [http://contentgems.com](http://contentgems.com)

~~~
bestnameever
> Check out [http://contengems.com](http://contengems.com).

Think you may have a typo, and intended to direct OP to
[http://contentgems.com](http://contentgems.com)

------
lucb1e
Depends, what do you use Google News for? I just read HN and Tweakers.net
(Dutch). If you want multiple sources, why not visit a few of its sources? Or
does Google News have an app that is convenient or something? I don't
understand what you are looking for exactly.

------
nupinion
Hi, we're now building nupinion.com which might address your needs. You can
use it for multi-sourcing, understanding propaganda and detecting unreliable
content quickly. You can also use it to track topics or to store articles for
later.

------
pan69
Friends of mine have built Inkl [1]. I think it's a pretty good alternative to
Google Newsstand (I assume that falls under "Google News").

[1] [https://www.inkl.com](https://www.inkl.com)

~~~
gnicholas
I'd be interested in talking with this team about partnerships. Any chance you
could make an intro? Also, the animations on their site load so slowly (at
least for me), that often I was scrolling and just seeing white. By the time
the animation loaded, I was already halfway past it.

~~~
philhsc
I'm an SVP @inkl, how can I help?

------
jboynyc
For a quick, U.S.-centric overview of current political news headlines,
Memeorandum is pretty good:

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

------
pbadenski
[http://eventregistry.org/search?type=events](http://eventregistry.org/search?type=events)
if you're looking for an API source

------
kehers
If Twitter is your thing, see [https://thefeed.press](https://thefeed.press).
Curates news links shared by your friends on Twitter

~~~
mi_lk
What's the difference between this and nuzzel?

~~~
kehers
For the most part, it is that the articles are extracted (Pocket/Instapaper
style) for easy read.

------
tedmiston
Techmeme is a good aggregator like Google News specific to startups and tech.

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

------
kyo3
I like newsmap.jp, but Feedly is my news source of choice.

~~~
frankydp
newsmap.jp is a great tool. Wish it was opensource, or was for profit so I
could pay for it.

~~~
anigbrowl
I'm surprised nobody has cloned it, treemaps aren't exactly obscure and
they're criminally underused. Thanks for reminding me about this, I'd
forgotten about it and it's just what I needed to unpin the now-ruined Google
News.

People put a lot of the blame on FB, but I think Google is as much to blame
for the epidemic of fake/crap news as anyone. I have been appalled at the
shitty quality of stuff showing up in my google news feed and treated as being
on a par with other sources over the last year or two. It's obvious taht
google only cares about this as a market rather than anyone there being
invested in News as an end in itself.

------
losdukos
[http://www.upday.com](http://www.upday.com) if you are on Samsung Android
(currently only in Europe).

------
john_mack
[https://virwire.com](https://virwire.com)

Continuous stream of socially curated news, formatted for mobile.

------
CodeGenie
[https://flipboard.com/](https://flipboard.com/)

------
teaneedz
Twitter + Feedly works great for me.

------
politips
[http://politips.us](http://politips.us)

------
akshxy
Feedly is the reason I no longer follow Google News.

------
edoceo
/r/news and other interest specific subs.

------
vasili111
reddit.com Just subscribe to the subreddits you are interested in.

------
NumberCruncher
Reading books?

~~~
Jach
Idea for a browser extension: randomly when you go to a time sink site (even
if the sink is only a few minutes), pull up some ebook text to read instead.

~~~
NumberCruncher
The best would be site recommending ebooks related to the news you just
started to read giving background or historycal information on the issue.

------
losteverything
Usatoday.com

Federalnewsradio.com

Bloomberg.com

------
tilt_error
omni.se if you are in Sweden

------
adgasf
Lobste.rs is a better website, but a smaller community.

[https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)

------
nippples
QuiteRSS

------
0xbear
Protip: identify the news sources you don't like and ban them wholesale under
"Manage Sections / Sources" in Google News. Banning just a few improves the
experience tremendously. HuffPo and Buzzfeed are prime candidates for the ban
hammer.

~~~
SyneRyder
This is a great tip (eg banning TMZ seems like a great idea). Unfortunately,
if you switch between US & regional Google News often (maybe you mostly read
Google News Australia), it has a tendency to delete all your carefully curated
settings on both sites.

You can also add preferred sources now, which helps a lot (when they don't
delete it). I found adding WSJ, Deutsche Welle, FT, Bloomberg, Financial
Review & similar sources improved things for me. I wish I could add blogs I
follow there too.

I'd love to see a Google News alternative that used a customisable whitelist
of sources, and mute filters to block topics I'm just not interested in.

~~~
0xbear
I actually think it just loses your choices completely on its own and local
news thing is unrelated. If you add them a few more times, they stick.

------
RodericDay
Not really a direct alternative, but applicable to the spirit of the question:

I don't really like any news organization very much, so instead anytime a
political/current events piece pops up here and I like it, I check to see if
the author has a Twitter account, and follow them on there. Then, via their
RTs and posts, I discover new journalists. If they consistently put out good
stuff, I follow them too.

As an example, someone here once put out a piece about Silicon Valley and
politics by Emmett Rensin, which I thought was spot-on. Rensin showcased
Nathan Robinson, then Abi Wilkinson. And so on and so on.

If you keep a sufficiently varied crowd of followers, geographically and
topically, you always see RTs of pertinent news events from eg: BBC, Reuters,
AP, or what have you.

In essence, what some of these services do algorithmically, I rely on humans
for. As a result I seem to be aware of just about any current event topic that
comes up, so it's working for me.

Don't use Twitter like Twitter itself suggests, e.g: "Follow Lebron! Follow
Donald Trump! Follow CNN!". Add people very very judiciously, so that your
feed looks like the news aggregator you wish to see.

------
timthelion
In the Czech Republic, for several years now, google news has been filled with
fascist propoganda. I think that no one sane from Google, who understands
Czech, ever looks there to see what kind of shit they're promoting.

~~~
threepipeproblm
Am I missing something? I translated a bunch of articles from the current
Czech Google News page and didn't see anything remotely fascist.

It seems there is a trend of those on the left referring to anything on the
right as fascist. IMO this is dangerous because it dilutes the actual meaning
of fascism. I'm not saying fascist ideology isn't out there btw.

Can you point out an example?

