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How do news aggregators get a list of news sites?

10 points by kevinfat ↗ HN
If I wanted to make a news aggregator site how do I get a curated list of news sites such as http://www.latimes.com/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Its not realistic for me to manually compile a list of them all by myself. How did the popular news aggregator sites build a comprehensive list?

8 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 11.1 ms ] thread
aviv
It's your lucky day. There are two data sets you can purchase for a decent price:

- 30M news headlines and 500K web sources, 30gb of JSON data ($300)

- 15K news domains that are the most popular in US market ($100)

These were gathered by Andrew Montalenti, co-founder of Parse.ly. See more info here: http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/python-crawling-slides/

al1x
Why not scrape Alexa's list of the top 500? -- http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/News As a side note, not to ruin your party or anything, but over the years a handful of HN users have made news aggregators as side projects and none of them have really gone anywhere. You might want to think about putting your effort into something else. Google News is a pretty sweet product.
ScottWhigham
Alexa's list is a good idea. You'd still need to curate considerable though - that would be the only issue. For example, Shutterstock is listed as the #16 news site on Alexa.
kevinfat
Do any of them have details of how they built their news aggregator? For example, what infrastructure did they use to crawl, parse, and index the pages, etc.
ScottWhigham
I think, logically, the question we should ask you is, "Why are you considering making a news aggregator site when you don't have the time to curate/determine which sources are good sources?" As a user, when I see a site that has "a list of news articles", I'm utterly underwhelmed and/or intimidated by the sheer number of articles. However, when I see a site that has a list of articles from good sources that I'd find interesting, I'll bookmark it.