Building a News Aggregator Without an Engagement Algorithm

I have been building a project called WeSearch :

https://wesearch.press

It is a free news aggregator that pulls from hundreds of sources, keeps discovery mostly chronological, adds source/bias context where available, preserves permanent daily archives, and allows anonymous discussion on stories.

The project started from a simple frustration:

Most news discovery products are either too personalized, too paywalled, too noisy, too opaque, or too socially distorted.

I wanted something closer to this:

a wide source feed

no account required

no paywall

no tracking

chronological discovery

source context

permanent archives

anonymous discussion

less algorithmic manipulation

That sounds simple, but once you start building it, the hard part is not fetching headlines.

The hard part is trust.

The problem with modern news discovery

There are several existing models for news discovery.

Google News is broad, but opaque.…