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Why Google News RSS won the bake‑off

Five free, key‑less sources were tested against the same rubric: authentication, browser reachability, topical breadth, native search, and refresh latency. Google News RSS covers every newsroom vertical and any arbitrary keyword query, which makes it the only feed that can serve both the category rail and the search box. Publisher RSS is kept in the mix because it carries descriptions and images that Google's feed strips.

Source	Auth	Browser	Breadth	Search	Score
Google News RSS selected	none	via proxy	20+ sections + any query	`?q=`	9.2
BBC / Guardian / Al Jazeera RSS	none	via proxy	~12 fixed sections	none	8.1
Hacker News Firebase + Algolia	none	native CORS	tech only	full‑text	7.6
GDELT 2.0 DOC API	none	native CORS	global, multilingual	full‑text	7.0
NewsAPI.org	API key	dev‑only CORS	150k sources	full‑text	5.4

Pipeline

Category → 4–6 feed URLs, fired in parallel with Promise.allSettled and a 9s AbortController each.
Each URL walks a proxy chain: allorigins → codetabs → corsproxy.io → rss2json.
RSS and Atom parse via DOMParser, with a regex reader as last resort; images from media:content, enclosure or inline HTML.
Dedupe on a normalised‑title hash, score freshness, cache per section in localStorage.
Trending = unigram + bigram frequency over titles (×3) and summaries (×1), weighted by 1 + 2e^(−age/12h).
Rendering is chunked with requestAnimationFrame + IntersectionObserver; cards use content-visibility.

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