I Got Sick of The Google News Algorithm, So I Built a Replacement

So this one started as a throwaway question to Claude and turned into a whole weekend project, which is honestly how most of my favorite builds go.

I asked Claude whether some new integration was worth installing. One thing led to another and somewhere in that conversation I mentioned a site I have always loved called brutalist.report — it is just headlines, no images, no autoplay video, no fifteen popups asking me to subscribe to a newsletter. Just the news, stripped down to the studs. The only problem is it pulls from a bunch of sources I do not care about, so half of what I am scrolling past is noise.

And that is really the whole thing for me. I always say Facebook has a terrible signal to noise ratio... way too much garbage for the little bit of stuff you actually want. That’s the reason i quit it over 6 years ago. Google news is the same way. I do not want to see another celebrity divorce, another sports score, another political outrage cycle... You know.. Clickbait I want drone industry news, tech, the occasional gaming headline. That is it. So I figured... why not just build the version I actually want.

Here is what I ended up with. It lives at a little address on one of my domains, it is hosted on my own server, and it pulls from a pile of RSS feeds I picked by hand — DroneDJ, Ars Technica, The Verge, NPR, a few subreddits, you get the idea. Every hour it goes out, grabs the latest headlines from all of them, sorts everything newest-first, and runs every single one through a keyword filter before it ever shows up on my screen.

That keyword filter is the magic part, and it is dead simple. I gave it a list of about 150 words I never want to see in a headline. Politicians' names, sports leagues, crypto hype, clickbait words like "slammed" and "you won't believe." If a headline contains one of those words, it never makes the cut. Gone. The one trick we had to get right is matching whole words instead of letters — you would be amazed how much breaks if you block the word "ICE" and suddenly every headline with the word "device" or "service" disappears too. Once Claude sorted that out it just... worked. I open the page and it is all signal.

Then the tinkerer in me came out full force…

It looked just like Brutilist.. Simple, Plain headlines. But that was not enough once I saw it come together, so I made it look like an actual news site — cards, thumbnails, a big lead story up top, the whole bit. Hover over a card on the computer or tap it on your phone and a little summary slides up so you can get the gist without leaving the page. Anything published since your last visit gets a little gold NEW badge, so I can see at a glance what changed since breakfast. It follows your phone into dark mode at night. There is a floating button in the corner to bump the text size up when my eyes are tired. Every day's edition gets archived so I can flip back and see what Tuesday looked like. And since it is a proper little web app now, I added it to my phone's home screen — it opens instantly like a real app and even works offline with the last edition it grabbed.\

The Admin Page

The part I am most proud of though is the admin page. I did not want to be editing code every time I thought of a new word to block or found a new site worth following. So there is a locked-down page where the whole thing manages itself. Want to follow a new site? Paste literally any link — the homepage is fine — and it goes and finds the RSS feed on its own, figures out the site's name, and adds it. Every blocked word is a little chip on the screen... type a word to block it, tap a chip to unblock it. Save, and the site rebuilds itself in about ten seconds. Thirty seconds from the couch and my news just... changes.

The Name

We went back and forth on a name for a while. I wanted something punchy. Landed on The Gist, because that is exactly what it is — the gist of the day, none of the filler. Then I had a logo made for it, three little bars shrinking down to a point, like the news boiling down to what matters. That logo's colors run through the whole site now — the section headers, the highlights, the badges. It actually feels like a real product instead of a science project.

Here is the part that still kind of gets me. This whole thing — the filtering, the layout, the summaries, the admin panel, the dark mode, the offline app, the hosting, the logo — came together in about two days, sitting at my desk going back and forth in plain English about what I wanted. No team, no budget, no asking permission. I had an itch, I described it, and I ended up with a private little newspaper that only prints the things I care about. Vibe coding…

I check it every morning now instead of heading to Brutilist or Google News.. And without all that garbage negativity or an algorithm trying to make me angry, im much happier. Same amount of information, a fraction of the noise.

SO yeah. If you have ever looked at your feeds and thought "ninety percent of this is garbage I never asked for"... you are not wrong, and you do not have to put up with it. Sometimes the move is to just build the thing you wish existed.