Newsliner

Inspiration

Have you ever wanted to stay updated on daily news but didn’t want to waste time scrolling through endless articles? Traditional news websites are often cluttered, full of ads, and packed with repetitive or spotty information. We wanted a solution that delivers the essence of the news at a glance — fast, simple, and distraction-free, from the convenience of your desktop.

What it does

Headline scrapes the most relevant news articles from trusted sources, extracts the key insights, and generates concise bullet-point summaries. Instead of sifting through paragraphs of filler, users get quick snapshots of what’s happening around the world.

How we built it

We used Javascript, Chrome extension functionality, NewsAPI, RSS, and Gemini in order to build a fully functional Chrome Extension widget to summarize news on the default Chrome tab.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating the React component into the static index.html page without using a bundler was tricky due to extension constraints. Furthermore, Content scraping required handling CORS issues and differences between news sites. Finally, Summarization sometimes produced overly vague or redundant results, requiring us to fine-tune prompts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of building a fully functional Chrome extension that shows summarized news on the new tab, and for creating a clean, modern UI with topic filters and a dropdown menu for changing preferences.

What we learned

We learned about APIs that could be used to scrape news sources, and gained technical expertise in writing Chrome extensions. We gained experience in creating a clean, modern UI with topic filters and a dropdown menu for changing preferences. We managed to integrate real-time news scraping + AI summarization end-to-end, and learned how to handle React + Chrome extension constraints successfully.

What's next for Headline

The future of Headline will use personalized feeds given user input. We are also going to integrate push notifications for breaking news, and allowing summaries in multiple formats instead of two: these can range from quick paragraph summaries, to even audio snippets. Finally, we are thinking of adding gameification in daily quiz/streak usage or even expanding support to a mobile app.

Built With

• chrome
• css
• gemini
• html
• javascript
• newsapi
• rss