BUILD VS BUY

We have been creating and customizing news scrapers since 2020. Every day, we face numerous challenges in keeping the News API running smoothly and providing our users with accurate and clean results. NewsCatcher has indexed over 1.5 billion articles from more than 75,000 sources worldwide to deliver news within 5 minutes after publication, with less than 2% false positives. We aim to handle the difficult work for you so you can focus on your core business and use relevant news insights to support your decisions.

However, if you choose to create your own news API, we recommend considering these top four factors, which we believe are crucial for long-term success.

Handling Diverse Website Structures

Although the websites may appear the same to the human eye, the way they are built underneath is very different. Some websites may block traffic that they identify as coming from a web scraper, even though web scraping is perfectly legal. Also, not all websites' data can be easily accessed using simple methods like HTTP requests and HTML or JSON parsing and may require using headless browsers. Developing web crawlers to access different website structures and avoid bans is expensive and time-consuming.

Adapting to Website Changes

News websites often update their designs and structures. When a website undergoes a full redesign or makes changes to its components, such as HTML structure or APIs, scrapers may no longer be able to find the data they need. In such cases, a new web scraper needs to be created from the beginning. This means that reliable web scraping requires ongoing monitoring of the target websites and the performance of the scrapers.

Ensuring Data Accuracy

Websites have varied structures, which results in different data formats when scraping news sites. For instance, consider a company monitoring global news. To ensure meaningful time-based queries, it is crucial to standardize the publication date and time in the final data feed to a single time zone. 

Not all news sources are reliable. Your analysts require news only from trustworthy sources to ensure the credibility of their analysis and insights, which in turn helps the business's C-suite make informed decisions. You can choose to rely on a few reputable outlets like the New York Times or the BBC, risking missing out on important events, especially local news. Alternatively, you may need to design a system to rank and evaluate each new source that analysts want to add for broader coverage.

Scaling Data Processing

As the number of news sources increases, so does the volume of data, driving up costs and labor requirements to maintain infrastructure.

As you expand your list of source websites, you may encounter new website structures that differ from the ones you are familiar with. This will likely require finding new methods to extract articles from these new sources. Adding more sources can lead to a variety of scraping issues that will need to be addressed. For instance, having more sources increases the chances of their structures changing, which could impact your existing pipelines and demand additional efforts to maintain crawlers.

Build or Buy a News API?

Just like with any software application, creating a news API comes with its fair share of challenges. If you opt to take the long route and build your own, these tips will come in handy. Alternatively, we invite you to explore our bespoke API, which provides a reliable and efficient solution for seamlessly integrating news content.