Design a News Aggregation Service
Last updated: July 22, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a news aggregation service that collects and displays articles from various sources based on user preferences.
Rippling
July 22, 20268
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116 solved
Design a news aggregation service that collects and displays articles from various sources based on user preferences.
This question is typically asked in onsite interviews for software engineering roles to evaluate a candidate's system design skills. The interviewer is looking for the candidate's ability to think through the architecture of a scalable and efficient service, including data sources, user preferences, and how to handle real-time updates. The candidate's approach to trade-offs and system scalability will also be assessed.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Identify key requirements and user stories for the service.
- Outline a high-level architecture including data sources and components.
- Discuss database design and data storage strategies.
- Explain how to handle real-time updates and user preferences.
- Address potential challenges and trade-offs in the design.
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you ensure the service scales with an increasing number of users?
- What strategies would you implement for data caching?
- How would you handle duplicate articles from different sources?
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Practice System Design ProblemsSample Answer
Requirements
To design a news aggregation service, we first need to define the core requirements:
- User Preferences: Users should be able to customize their news feed based on topics, sources, and keywords....
High-Level Design
The architecture can be broken down into several components:
- Frontend: A web or mobile interface for users to interact with the service.
- Backend: A RESTful API to handle requests and serv...
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