GoogleNews Class

from pygooglenews import GoogleNews
# default GoogleNews instance
gn = GoogleNews(lang = 'en', country = 'US')

To get access to all the functions, you first have to initiate the GoogleNews class.

It has 2 required variables: lang and country

You can try any combination of those 2, however, it does not exist for all. Only the combinations that are supported by GoogleNews will work. Check the official Google News page to check what is covered:

On the bottom left side of the Google News page, you may find a Language & region section where you can find all of the supported combinations.

For example, for country=UA (Ukraine), there are 2 languages supported:

  • lang=uk Ukrainian
  • lang=ru Russian

Top Stories

top = gn.top_news(proxies=None, scraping_bee = None)

top_news() returns the top stories for the selected country and language that are defined in GoogleNews class. The returned object contains feed (FeedParserDict) and entries list of articles found with all data parsed.


Stories by Topic

business = gn.topic_headlines('BUSINESS', proxies=None, scraping_bee = None)

The returned object contains feed (FeedParserDict) and entries list of articles found with all data parsed.

Accepted topics are:

  • WORLD
  • NATION
  • BUSINESS
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • ENTERTAINMENT
  • SCIENCE
  • SPORTS
  • HEALTH

However, you can find some other topics that are also supported by Google News.

For example, if you search for corona in the search tab of en + US you will find COVID-19 as a topic.

The URL looks like this: https://news.google.com/topics/CAAqIggKIhxDQkFTRHdvSkwyMHZNREZqY0hsNUVnSmxiaWdBUAE?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

We have to copy the text after topics/ and before ?, then you can use it as an input for the top_news() function.

from pygooglenews import GoogleNews

gn = GoogleNews()
covid = gn.topic_headlines('CAAqIggKIhxDQkFTRHdvSkwyMHZNREZqY0hsNUVnSmxiaWdBUAE')

However, be aware that this topic will be unique for each language/country combination.


Stories by Geolocation

gn = GoogleNews('uk', 'UA')
kyiv = gn.geo_headlines('kyiv', proxies=None, scraping_bee = None)
# or
kyiv = gn.geo_headlines('kiev', proxies=None, scraping_bee = None)
# or
kyiv = gn.geo_headlines('киев', proxies=None, scraping_bee = None)
# or
kyiv = gn.geo_headlines('Київ', proxies=None, scraping_bee = None)

The returned object contains feed (FeedParserDict) and entries list of articles found with all data parsed.

All of the above variations will return the same feed of the latest news about Kyiv, Ukraine:

geo['feed'].title

# 'Київ - Останні - Google Новини'

It is language-agnostic, however, it does not guarantee that the feed for any specific place will exist. For example, if you want to find the feed on LA or Los Angeles you can do it with GoogleNews('en', 'US').

The main (en, US) Google News client will most likely find the feed about the most places.


Stories by a Query

gn.search(query: str, helper = True, when = None, from_ = None, to_ = None, proxies=None, scraping_bee=None)

The returned object contains feed (FeedParserDict) and entries list of articles found with all data parsed.

Google News search itself is a complex function that has inherited some features from the standard Google Search.

The official reference on what could be inserted

The biggest obstacle that you might have is to write the URL-escaping input. To ease this process, helper = True is turned on by default.

helper uses urllib.parse.quote_plus to automatically convert the input.

For example:

  • 'New York metro opening' —> 'New+York+metro+opening'
  • 'AAPL -MSFT' —> 'AAPL+-MSFT'
  • '"Tokyo Olimpics date changes"' —> '%22Tokyo+Olimpics+date+changes%22'

You can turn it off and write your own query in case you need it by helper = False

when parameter (str) sets the time range for the published datetime. I could not find any documentation regarding this option, but here is what I deducted:

  • h for hours.(For me, worked for up to 101h). when=12h will search for only the articles matching the search criteria and published for the last 12 hours
  • d for days
  • m for a amonth (For me, worked for up to 48m)

I did not set any hard limit here. You may try put here anything. Probably, it will work. However, I would like to warn you that wrong inputs will not lead to an error. Instead, the when parameter will be ignored by the Google.

from_ and to_ accept the following format of date: %Y-%m-%d For example, 2020-07-01

Output Body

All 4 functions return the dictionary that has 2 sub-objects:

  • feed - contains the information on the feed metadata
  • entries - contains the parsed articles

Both are inherited from the Feedparser. The only change is that each dictionary under entries also contains sub_articles which are the similar articles found in the description. Usually, it is non-empty for top_news() and topic_headlines() feeds.

Tip To check what is the found feed’s name just check the title under the feed dictionary