⚙️ Technical methodology

BasketFeed is built on a simple but robust architecture, completely free and open source.

Overall architecture

The site relies on two components:

• Frontend: Static HTML/CSS/JS hosted on Netlify (or GitHub Pages)
• Backend: A Cloudflare Worker that acts as a proxy to query RSS feeds and Google News

1. Cloudflare Worker (backend)

The worker exposes a single route: /aggregate?country=XX. On each call, it:

• Queries Google News with multiple queries per country
• Queries specialized RSS feeds configured for that country
• Merges all results, deduplicates (by normalized title + link), and sorts by descending date
• Returns a JSON containing articles (title, link, source, date)

2. Frontend (index.html)

The main page:

• Loads articles via fetch() to the worker
• Provides instant search by keyword (title + source)
• Offers a country filter (120+ countries available)
• Saves theme (light/dark) and last selected country in localStorage
• Displays articles with pagination (50 by default, "Load more" button)

3. Deduplication strategy

To avoid duplicate articles (e.g., Ouest-France and Maville Angers publishing the same content), the worker:

• Normalizes the title (removes source at the end, lowercases, removes special characters)
• Compares the first 80 characters of the normalized title
• Also compares the article URL
• Keeps only one occurrence per duplicate

4. Country coverage

For each country, BasketFeed uses:

• Custom Google News queries with appropriate hl (language) and gl (geolocation) parameters
• Keywords adapted to the local language
• Specialized RSS feeds when available (France, USA, Spain, Italy, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, Lithuania)

For countries without identified RSS feeds, only Google News is used.

5. Known limitations

• Some sites block automated requests (e.g., Ouest-France returns 403). Those articles are still accessible via Google News.
• Chinese RSS feeds are very rare: China relies only on Google News.
• The worker has a 15-20 second timeout. If a country has too many queries, loading time may be long.

6. Source code & contributions

BasketFeed is 100% open source on GitHub. You can:

• Report bugs
• Suggest new specialized RSS feeds
• Propose code improvements
• Fork the project for your own use

📌 Last updated: April 2026