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Feed Ranking Explained
What decides the order of your Headlinne feed? Learn, in plain language, how the ranking blends relevance, freshness, diversity, and exploration into your feed.
By Headlinne Editorial Team · Updated on
Ranking is how the feed is built
Your feed is not a random list—it is a ranking. Every candidate story is scored, and the scores decide the order you see. Understanding ranking is understanding why your feed looks the way it does.
Headlinne's ranking is a weighted blend of signals, tuned to keep the feed relevant, fresh, and broad all at once.
The signals in the blend
Each story is scored on a combination of:
- Subtopic and topic match to your interests
- Entity match—specific people, companies, and places you follow
- Semantic similarity to what you read, by meaning
- Geographic relevance to your location
- Freshness, via a decaying recency score
- Collaborative and trending signals from broader reading patterns
From scores to your feed
These weighted signals combine into a single score per story, and the highest-scoring candidates rank highest. But pure top-score ranking would narrow the feed, so Headlinne reserves portions for exploration and diversity—roughly a majority high-relevance, with meaningful shares for exploration and variety.
New users tilt more toward exploration while the system learns them, then settle into a steady balance.
Why it is built this way
The blended, multi-signal approach is deliberate: relevance keeps the feed yours, freshness keeps it current, and reserved exploration and diversity keep it from becoming a bubble. No single signal is allowed to dominate.
For the full engineering detail—weights, vector search, and exploration algorithms—see the Recommendation Engine articles.
Key takeaways
- ✓Your feed is a ranking—every story is scored, and scores set the order.
- âś“Signals include topic, entity, semantic, geographic, freshness, and collaborative match.
- âś“Headlinne reserves part of the feed for exploration and diversity so it stays broad.
Frequently asked questions
Is my feed just the stories most relevant to me?
Mostly, but not entirely. A majority is high-relevance, but Headlinne deliberately reserves portions for exploration, diversity, and major stories, so your feed stays broad rather than narrowing.
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