Building a Better Way To Quickly Digest News: Lessons Learned
I created Newsway.ai, a news summary website using Gemini 2.5 to summarize 30 - 40 news articles every 10 minutes. So far, it has been a journey of using practical code to solve real pain points in how people get their news. Here are some of the biggest struggles I faced, and what tools I used to solve them.
1. Battling Duplicate Articles
News aggregators often pull the same story from multiple sources. To keep things clean, I built a deduplication system that compares headlines, URLs, and even content summaries programmatically and using ai for further duplicate detection afterwards. Only the most recently published article on a topic makes it through to your feed. While this may sound like a heuristic, it is intentional as I think providing recent coverage is useful to people.
2. Keeping It Free
I wanted Newsway.ai to be accessible to everyone. That meant optimizing for low or non-existent server costs, using efficient APIs, and never locking features behind a paywall. Every feature, from filtering to summaries, is free for all.
3. Reliable and relatively unbiased AI Summaries—Every Time
Getting the AI to output news in a strict JSON format (without fail) was a challenge. I refined the backend prompt I made until the AI always responded with valid, parseable JSON which I can consistently use to construct the card summaries I provide every ten minutes.
4. API throttling
To avoid hitting rate limits or service interruptions, I implemented a rotating API key system with persistent memory. This keeps the news flowing, even if one key gets throttled or blocked.
5. Dynamic Splash Animations
Every visit to Newsway greets you with one of four randomly selected splash animation. This small touch keeps the experience fresh for returning users. I used a random number generator to generate the random order of 4 animations, and i keep track of which one was used, and every cycle of 4 resets. This simple but effective choice makes the animations naturally appear random.
6. Smarter, Safer Summaries
Some news topics require extra care. I use backend prompt engineering to describe what constitutes inappropriate language for the news in punctilious detail, giving language examples and giving strict boundaries in specific scenarios.
For instance:
"...- Any articles which contain the word astrology or astrologer are defunct and must be rejected..."
"...If you are referring to a given article directly in the summary, use the word article to describe the article rather than a technical name for the text or a term for the text's name in the json you receive..."
7. Filtering Which Persists on Refresh
Rarely are we able to save our filtering preferences such that they load when the website loads. Sometimes google will save the filter we choose temporarily, but these preferences almost never persist, if at all. This feature just made sense, so that the app can actually serve you content you want to see consistently. I use local storage and efficiently reflow the dom on loading the page to cater to making filtering extremely fast and reliable every time the page is loaded.
Screenshots From Mobile
Building Newsway has been a lesson in balancing reliability, safety, and user experience. I genuinely feel this is an original implementation of automated news summaries, one which respects that how we view our news is just as important as viewing the news itself. If you have ideas for more features or improvements, I’d love to hear them! I'm going to add scheduling next so users can schedule when they filter what content.