Design a news aggregator like Google News
Quick Overview
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing scalable, low-latency distributed systems for content aggregation, personalization, and high-traffic handling, with attention to freshness and high availability.
Rippling
Feb 12, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
7
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Scenario
Design a News Aggregator Service similar to Google News. The system aggregates articles from many publishers and shows users:
- Top Stories (global, same for everyone)
- Personalized news based on user subscriptions
When a user clicks a story, the service redirects the user to the publisher’s original article.
Functional requirements
- Users can subscribe to Topics (e.g., Sports, AI, Politics).
- Users can subscribe to Publishers (e.g., NYT, ESPN).
- The system provides a general “Top Stories” feed for everyone.
- The system provides a personalized feed based on subscriptions.
- Clicking a story redirects to the publisher site.
Non-functional requirements (clarify in interview)
- Low latency for feed reads (e.g., p95 < 200 ms)
- High availability
- Freshness (new articles show up quickly)
- Handle traffic spikes ("celebrity" publishers or breaking news)
Follow-ups
- Discuss Push vs Pull approaches for feed generation.
- How do you handle the celebrity problem (a few publishers/topics dominate traffic)?
- How would you detect that a publisher is “celebrity” (hot/high-traffic) in near real-time?
Solution
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