Companies today rely on data to run every aspect of their business — from operations and logistics to marketing and sales. They use it to uncover valuable insights that will help them gain a competitive advantage and succeed in an increasingly competitive global market.
Real-time news data gives businesses an even greater advantage because they can make informed decisions based on current market trends, industry news, and world events. They can also use it to keep tabs on their competition.
We created this guide to highlight the power of news data and how the Webz.io News API enables you to maximize its potential.
What is a news API?
A news API allows software, platforms, and applications to connect to a source or multiple sources of online news data. Some news APIs collect and aggregate news information from millions of sites across the web, while others provide news data from a single news site (e.g., The Guardian, The New York Times).
News APIs use machine learning to collect and parse news information from various news sources, including websites and articles. They use natural language processing (NLP) to recognize relevant parameters such as categories, sentiments, topics, persons, dates, and events. The API then tags the data with contextual meta-data and delivers it in a format that machines can read and understand. Consider for a moment the massive volume of news information published online every minute. If your automated solution depends on diverse web data, you’ll need to leverage comprehensive and continuous high-quality news sources to deliver accurate insights to your customers.
What is the Webz.io News API?
Webz.io collects data from open, deep, and dark web sources. We provide this data in the form of feeds, most of which we make available through REST APIs and a firehose solution. The Webz.io News API is one of our open web APIs. Using our APIs, platforms, and applications can generate relevant insights at scale. The Webz.io News API provides structured, noise-free, enriched news data feeds from millions of sites. You get access to news sources in 170+ languages going back to 2008. The feeds enrich the data with smart entities like sentiment and type. The API uses an Adaptive Crawler, a unique technology we’ve developed to increase the number (it doubled!) of news articles we gather daily.
Basic features every news API should have
Perhaps you’ve realized you need a news API, but you’re not sure which one to choose. A good news API will have these five qualities at a minimum:
#1 Comprehensive
One of the most important factors to consider when choosing a news API is its comprehensiveness. This means that the API aggregates web data from multiple sources and different regions, and in a wide range of languages. A comprehensive API allows users to access many kinds of news in one place. If the API provides relevant news data, you can give your customers access to the most up-to-date and accurate information available.
#2 Structured and machine-readable
You should look closely at the structure and format of the news data the API provides. If the news data isn’t structured and machine-readable, you’ll have difficulty scaling the data for your customers and your business. The structure and format of the news data impact how well platforms and applications can use it as well as the cost of generating actionable insights. Without structured and machine-readable news data, generating actionable insights becomes more demanding and expensive.
#3 Relevant and timely
Businesses need news data that is relevant and up-to-date — this is especially true for industries that need to stay on top of the latest news or events. For example, financial analysis, reputation monitoring, and media intelligence companies need to know the most recent news and mentions for specific brands before they can deliver accurate and relevant information to their customers. A real-time news API will give you the most up-to-date news.
#4 Noise-free
Some news APIs include elements in the data that you don’t need, such as:
- Advertisements
- Navigation links
- Raw code (e.g., HTML, JavaScript)
- Unadjusted date formats (date formats are not adjusted to regional variations)
The news API you choose should filter out the noise, setting free the crucial data you need. It should understand how to sort through irrelevant and unstructured items and provide meaningful data for your customers.
#5 Historical
While timeliness is an essential quality for a news API, it should also provide historical news data. You need historical news data to analyze and understand long-term trends. For example, a financial analysis platform would need historical finance-related news (and real-time data) to generate trend reports and forecasts. Training AI models, especially LLMs, requires massive amounts of historical web data. A company developing AI models would need a news API that provides large-scale, quality historical news web data.
Many news API vendors offer basic web scraping services instead of continuous streams of news data — which means you get finite datasets. A limited news API can work well for some projects. But for continuous and adjustable analysis as well as scalability, you should consider choosing a comprehensive news API with robust features.
Free news dataset vs. Webz.io News API
Many companies turn to free news datasets (as opposed to news APIs) to obtain useful news data for platforms and applications. You can get free news data sets from commercial companies like Webz.io or open-source dataset projects like Common Crawl. We provide free samples of our News API web data for more than 50 countries.
There are advantages to using free datasets, namely the cost (they’re free!). They can work well for companies with a technical team that can process and analyze the data. However, a free news dataset isn’t really free. You incur other costs associated with leveraging that data.
When you compare free news datasets to the Webz.io News API, you may find that using our commercial API would be more cost-effective and time-saving for your platform or application.
Free News Datasets vs. Webz.io News API
| Free News Datasets | Webz.io News API | |
| Cost | Free to use — anyone can access and use the data without any cost. | Paid service — cost varies, flexible pricing options available. Cost depends on the amount of data you need. |
| How data is provided | Many come in large raw files you need to download. | Through a RESTful API or Firehose — for easy integration with apps and systems. |
| Data structure | The news data is often not structured or imperfectly structured. | Advanced web scraping techniques are used to provide cleaned and structured data from HTML. Data does NOT include HTML. |
| Data quality | Datasets often include unwanted content, such as advertisements, navigation links, and raw code. | Only useful news data sites are crawled. We also format, clean, and enrich the data. You get high-quality news data with NO noise. |
| Coverage | Typically limited in scope (often drawing on only a handful of news publications) | Crawls millions of sites — covering news, blogs, discussions, and reviews. Coverage grows daily, and we can add new sources according to needs. |
| Real-time data available | No — free news datasets only provide limited historical data. | Yes — Webz.io provides real-time data. Users can access the latest news information as soon as it becomes available. |
| Filtering options | Typically no filtering options to help users find specific information. | Users can filter the data based on specific criteria, e.g., language, location, keywords, and sentiment. Helps improve the relevance and quality of the data. |
| Scalability | Difficult and costly to scale — additional skills and resources needed to scale. | Our News API scales automatically to meet your current business needs. We also manage the service. |
Ways to use the Webz.io News API
There are so many use cases for our News API, and we’ve covered many of them in our previous blog posts. Here are a few ways platforms and applications could leverage the Webz.io News API:
Media intelligence
Media intelligence platforms provide insights to their users so they can better understand their customers, competitors, industry, and brands. Webz.io news API analyzes millions of news stories from media platforms, blogs, and influencers. It enables these platforms to optimize brand monitoring, boost sentiment analysis, and strengthen reputational risk monitoring.
Financial monitoring
Automated solutions like financial monitoring, competitive intelligence, and sales intelligence need quality data to provide their customers with a complete financial picture. Our News API helps these solutions monitor critical market information in near real-time and provides access to historical finance-related information as well.
Risk intelligence and management
Companies face risks in so many ways today, and the ability to recognize potential risks early can help them make informed decisions to better manage those risks — that’s where automated risk intelligence and management platforms come in. Our news API enables these platforms to handle all aspects of risk management — from third-party risk and supply chain risk to adverse media screening and ESG risk.
Webz.io News API real-world implementations
So now that you know some of the use cases for the Webz.io API, let’s look at a couple of implementations in the real world.
Mention
Mention is a monitoring and social media management platform. The company uses Webz.io to expand its existing coverage, enabling users to monitor more than one billion sources across the web every day These sources include articles, review sites, forums, blogs, and news sites. The news API makes it easy to add new data sources and delivers up-to-the-minute live data latency. With the Webz.io News API, Mention can expand coverage and scale the platform without compromising latency.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media analytics tool that allows you to instantly analyze brand mentions, campaigns, multiple profiles, and influencers. The platform uses the Webz.io News API to take a sophisticated approach to monitoring web mentions. The approach includes comprehensive coverage and a laser focus on analyzing mentions. The platform looks for mentions in various web content, including news, forums, and blogs. It monitors and analyzes content across millions of websites and over a hundred languages. Users can track conversations and mentions, keep tabs on industry leaders, and track evolving trends in real-time.
Getting started with the Webz.io News API
Our News API is designed with the user in mind, easy to use, and flexible. As an example, let’s say you’re an automaker, and every automobile you manufacture requires 1,500 microprocessors. You’ve already experienced a recent chip shortage, and you worry about future shortages in the supply chain. You could use our News API to track the news for relevant information, spotting problems early and reacting in time. All you have to do to start working on this problem with our API is complete four easy steps:
Step #1: Sign up for a Webz.io account
You’ll be provided with an API key that you can use to run queries. You can sign up here.
Step #2: Identify the main keywords representing the information you are after
The primary keyword is “microprocessor,” so an alternative you could add is “microchip.” Next, you need to help our system find articles related to “supply chain,” so you would add that as a keyword. To further refine your query, you would add keywords like “shortage” or “deficiency.” You could also take a different angle and add the keyword “demand.”
Step #3: Structure the query
After creating your keywords, you now have a good foundation for your query. Next, you want to ensure the relevancy of the data you’ll retrieve. You need business-related facts, so you would limit the query to news posts that contain your keywords in the title. You might also specify domain rank to keep out low-quality content.
The query in our example might look like this:
thread.title:(microprocessor$ OR “microchip”) AND (“supply chain” OR “shortage” OR “deficiency” OR “demand”) language:english site_type:news domain_rank:<7000 is_first:true
Running this query will retrieve news data on microprocessor and microchip shortages and supply chain developments in English.
Step #4: Customize the feed
Webz.io’s News API offers additional filters you can use to customize your feed. NLP software identifies the meaning and sentiment behind the content. Webz.io also structures and enriches the output to make it easily readable by automated platforms. These features are useful when the topic is general and widely covered in the news.
Once satisfied, copy the URL from the API Endpoint into your system. Start consuming continuous data feeds.
Explore the possibilities
We encourage you to explore and leverage the power of our News API for real-time news. Don’t wait to unleash the power of news data and see all the benefits and value it enables you to provide to your customers.
Ready to get started? If you don’t yet have access to Webz.io’s News API, talk to one of our data experts now.
