Design a Google News-Style Newsfeed

Published 3 October 2026

Onsite System Design — Google News-Style Newsfeed

The system design interview asked me to design a personalized news platform similar to Google News, including both article ingestion and the user-facing feed.

Ingestion and Feed Delivery

The interviewer asked how to collect articles from multiple sources and compare fan-out-on-read with fan-out-on-write for generating feeds.

Personalization and Breaking News

Users could select preferred topics and publishers. We also discussed how to serve users without explicit preferences using precomputed cached content, and how breaking news should be surfaced broadly regardless of normal personalization.