Google News: System Definition and Goals

Step 1: System Definition and Goals

Let's design a news aggregator like Google News. An aggregator collects news articles from many external sources and shows them in one feed. The sources are newspapers, news channels, blogs, and similar publishers.

The goal is a personalized feed that updates in near real time. Each user's feed follows that user's own preferences. A user can follow channels, categories like politics, sports, or tech, or particular entities like a celebrity, a sports team, or an artist.

The system supports two delivery modes. Pull is the user refreshing the feed