What this is
News apps send breaking-news alerts to your phone. Each one is an editor deciding that something matters enough to interrupt you. Headline Gator collects those alerts from 26 news apps and puts them in one list, newest first, so you can see what every newsroom thought was urgent without installing 26 apps or letting any of them buzz your phone.
It is a reading list, not a newspaper. Nothing here is written, edited or ranked by us: the wording is the publisher’s own alert text, and the order is simply the order the alerts arrived.
How it works
A dedicated Android phone sits on a shelf with the news apps installed and their alerts switched on. It does nothing else. When an app posts a notification, an automation tool on the phone forwards the publisher, the alert text and the timestamp to this site, which stores one row per alert.
The awkward part is the link. A push notification contains no web address — that was the first thing we checked, by dumping real notifications. The destination lives inside Android’s tap-handling data, which apps are not required to expose, so the alert arrives as a headline with nowhere to go. The site then has to work out which article it announced:
- Matching the headline. Every publisher’s RSS feeds and Google News sitemap are fetched and compared with the alert text. Most alerts are the headline verbatim, so most match here.
- Asking a model. Publishers often reword the alert (“The Christian legal movement has become dangerously politicized” for an article titled “Why a lawyer who launched the Christian legal movement believes it’s gone astray”). When string matching fails, the eight most likely articles are put to a language model, described below. It is asked ten minutes after the alert, and again later, because some articles reach the public feeds hours after the push.
- Giving up gracefully. Some articles never appear in any public feed — features, opinion pieces, and anything behind a paywall with no feed at all. Those rows show a Search link instead, pointed at that publisher’s site.
About 70% of settled alerts end up with a direct link. The rest keep their Search link, which is a fair description of what the site knows.
The model that reads the rewrites
The matching question is small and strange: given one alert and eight candidate articles, which one — if any — does this alert announce? It needs judgement, because “markets tumble as the Fed holds” and “Fed leaves rates unchanged, stocks slide” are the same story in different words. It does not need eloquence, and it is asked thousands of times a month.
So the site uses Jev, a small model built for exactly this shape of problem, through OpenRouter’s decisions interface. Rather than writing an answer in prose that then has to be parsed, it returns a typed choice — one of the numbered articles, or none — along with a calibrated confidence: a number that means what it says, so 0.9 really is more reliable than 0.7. The site ignores anything under 0.6 and leaves the alert unlinked instead.
That last part matters more than the hit rate. A wrong link is worse than no link, because it quietly sends you to the wrong article, and the most tempting mistake here is a sibling — the follow-up or the explainer about the same event rather than the piece the alert announced. Before adopting it we ran it against alerts whose correct articles we already knew, and separately against the same alerts with the right answer removed, to see whether it would invent a match rather than decline. It answered “none” when it should, and picked no wrong article at any confidence.
In practice it answers in well under a second for a fraction of a cent, and it is responsible for 30% of every link on this site — the alerts that plain text matching could never have caught. Its accepted picks average 0.85 confidence.
How to use it
- Pick an edition. Headline Gator is 5 major newsrooms, Finance Gator is 9 markets and business sources, Global Gator is 7 from outside the US, and Everything is all 26. Custom is any combination you like.
- Tap a publisher’s name in the row of sources to see only that publisher.
- Take your settings with you. Create a profile link on the preferences page and open it on another browser or your phone to get the same edition there. The link is the only identifier, so bookmark it if you want to keep it.
- Options. You can turn on an Archive link next to each story, and choose light or dark (which follows your browser unless you say otherwise).
What about privacy
There are no accounts, no passwords and no email addresses. Your edition and source choices live in cookies on your device; a profile is a list of source names and nothing else. Clicks on stories are counted in aggregate so we can see which sources earn their place, without IP addresses or anything that identifies a visitor.
Why is a story missing or wrong
The usual reasons: the publisher never sent that alert to Android (alerts differ by platform and by account); the alert arrived but its article isn’t in any public feed yet, so it is still hunting for a link; or the phone itself stopped forwarding. That last one is visible — if the phone goes quiet, a notice appears at the top of the list rather than leaving you to wonder why the news stopped.