Design a news aggregator like Google News
Company: Rippling
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
## 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
1. Users can **subscribe to Topics** (e.g., Sports, AI, Politics).
2. Users can **subscribe to Publishers** (e.g., NYT, ESPN).
3. The system provides a **general “Top Stories”** feed for everyone.
4. The system provides a **personalized feed** based on subscriptions.
5. 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
1. Discuss **Push vs Pull** approaches for feed generation.
2. How do you handle the **celebrity problem** (a few publishers/topics dominate traffic)?
3. How would you **detect** that a publisher is “celebrity” (hot/high-traffic) in near real-time?
Quick Answer: 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.