Show HN: European tech news in 6 languages

[Merinov]

I built a multilingual news aggregator for European tech in 6 languages (EN, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL), filterable by audience (consumers, businesses, government) to help users discover relevant European alternatives.

A few interesting technical challenges:

PATTERN-BASED IMAGE GENERATION Generic AI images all look the same ("holographic businessman with laptop"). I solved this with a JSON database of 60+ concrete visual patterns—context-aware selection prevents repetition. Funding news → coins/contracts, security → locks/shields. Much more visual diversity. Still needs tweaking though.

GRADUAL SITEMAP GROWTH FOR NEW SITES Daily news pipeline generates lots of content. Challenge: Google indexes new sites slowly—exposing all 2K+ URLs at once resulted in 1-3% indexing rate. Solution: Dynamic rolling window in sitemap—only expose top 50 most recent articles (300 URLs), gradually increasing to 100 → 150 → 200 over 6 months as site builds authority. Result: Indexing rate improved to 10%.

AUTOMATED TRANSLATION PIPELINE RSS aggregation → AI summaries and translation with context-aware prompts → human review queue. Still tweaking quality per language pair.

STACK: Next.js 15 with Turbopack, PostgreSQL, deployed via Sliplane@Hetzner which works pretty ok.

STATUS: 1+ month post launch, 80 pages indexed, 100+ European apps featured (Mollie, Wire, Ecosia, LanguageTool, etc.)

FEEDBACK WELCOME ON: • European news sources I'm missing? • Better approaches to multilingual SEO? • Translation quality red flags? • How to optimize for LLM discovery (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.)?

[rr2841]

Things that I liked:

* The article selection (which is probably the most important part)

Things that I did not liked:

* AI Images. While they are well made and not as cringe as others, I prefer to get stock images even if they are repeated.

* Lack of RSS (or at least I couldn't find it). This is a deal breaker for me

Nice busy!

[Merinov]

Thanks for the feedback. Really appreciate that the article selection resonates as that's the core value prop.

RSS: You're the second to mention this already, makes it even more priority.

AI Images: Noted. The pattern was to avoid generic stock "businessman shaking hands" photos, but clearly it's not working for everyone. Options i consider now are: 1. Hide images in RSS/reader mode 2. Stock images as fallback 3. User preference toggle

Would a "reader mode" without images help?

[shlip]

Nice idea, but it does not work without JS. It's baffling to me that more and more sites use this (dark?) pattern of requiring JS just to display links.

EDIT: Well I was too quick, it partially works, you can click the grey "source" link on white bg for each article. Why not make the whole div a link instead ?

The sorting menus on top of the page are not working without JS though.

[Merinov]

Thanks for testing! The whole card IS clickable actually, it has two click targets: Click anywhere on the card and it goes to the summary article page on europedigital.cloud (with translations, context, etc.) Click the "source" link and it goes directly to the original article

This way users can choose: read our summary/translations, or jump straight to the source. Tried to make it intuitive without cluttering the UI.

You're right about the sorting/filtering requiring JS though - it's client-side state. Could move that to URL params for better progressive enhancement.

Appreciate the detailed feedback, this kind of testing helps! :)

[LosMyke]

Really like this. Eager for the RSS to be launched so it can be in my daily news routine.

[Merinov]

Thank you! As of now RSS has even more priority :)

[4ggr0]

very cool idea, but the AI-generated images really irk me. firstly because they're AI-generated images, secondly because they're just flat-out wrong for the example i clicked on.

Take this[0],

DATENSCUNTZ-EINSTELLUNES should be DATENSCHUTZ-EINSTELLUNGEN

ALLE AKZIETTREN should be ALLE AKZEPTIEREN

you get the point, basically almost all the text is wrong...i think AI-generated images are annoying and vapid enough, but if they don't even show actual text then what's the point? the english ones seem to be fine, can't judge the spanish ones. images feel like a lazy business-powerpoint.

anyways, cool site in general :)

[0]https://europedigital.cloud/_next/image?url=%2Fapi%2Fnews-im...

[Merinov]

True and good catch on the German text. Fair point, AI image generation struggles with non-English text rendering. This is a known issue I've been wrestling with.

Options I'm considering: 1. Text-free abstract patterns for non-English articles 2. Language-specific image validation before publishing 3. Manual review queue for non-English images

The pattern-based approach was meant to avoid generic "holographic businessman" images, but clearly the execution needs work for multilingual content.

Thanks for the detailed feedback: this is input I need. Herzlichen dank!

[andyjohnson0]

I'm getting Secure Connection Failed error in Firefox. HN hug of death?

I suggest posting this in Show HN [1] if your server can handle it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/show

[Merinov]

Thanks for flagging! Checking now - site loads fine for me but might be regional/SSL issue. Can you try again? Also checking server capacity.

For others having issues, direct link: https://europedigital.cloud/en/news

Appreciate the heads up! :)

[visarga]

You can select by source and audience, but not by topic. I found that a bit strange, topic would be the first thing we filter by. Why don't you dress up the summarization prompt with a task to generate tags?

[Merinov]

Good point. You can currently search for topics (search bar), but I see what you mean, dedicated topic filters/tags would be even more intuitive than having to type.

Interesting idea about using AI to auto-tag articles with topics. What specific topics would be most useful for you? (Thinking: AI/ML, Funding, Privacy/GDPR, Regulation, Open Source, etc.)

Topic filtering could work well alongside the current audience/source filters. Will add this to the roadmap for sure, thnks! :)

[max-privatevoid]

Why does this have ads and tracking?

[Merinov]

Valid question. Let me clarify:

NO ADS: Zero advertising. No ad network scripts.

TRACKING: Only privacy-respecting essentials: . Sliplane (European hosting) server logs . No Google Analytics, no third-party trackers

What made you think there's tracking? I want to fix any privacy concerns immediately. This is a European digital sovereignty project & privacy is the whole point.

Can you share what triggered the concern? (Specific script/banner you saw?) Thanks for your help.

[add-sub-mul-div]

It's yet more LLM shovelware from yet another account with only self-promotion activity. Why wouldn't it?

[vindex10]

RSS or/and newsletter would be nice (but manually curated, not ai summary)

[Merinov]

RSS feed is on the roadmap. Planning to implement: - Per-language RSS feeds (/en/news/feed.xml etc.) - Manually curated (articles are already human-selected from sources)

Newsletter is an interesting idea too. Im thinking about a weekly curated roundup per segment. What would your preference be? Thank you for your feedback, well appreciated.

[beardyw]

The pointless illustrations was what stood out most for me.

[Merinov]

Interesting perspective. Can you elaborate? Like: You'd prefer no images at all (text-only)? Or the AI-generated style doesn't work for you? Or something else?

I added them because plain text feels bare, but I'm curious what would work better. Real screenshots? Article-pulled images? Or just skip visuals entirely?

Honest feedback helps, thanks!

[jonas_scholz]

Thank you for mentioning Sliplane! Really cool project.

[Merinov]

Thanks Jonas, Sliplane made it easy to deploy :)

[gethly]

Good. I welcome it. I am quite tired of 'merica.

[Merinov]

Haha appreciate the support! It's not about being tired of US tech it's about making sure European innovation gets, at least, equal airtime :D Coverage gap is real, just my two cents to balance things out

[larrywinch]

european artificial intelligence ftw!!!

[mcrk]

What's the point?, its gonna turn into another slop of "we use AI to.." type of startup updates (but with less valuation, because it's EU)

[larrywinch]

let's go!!!

[Merinov]

Thanks! Yeah, trying to bring more attention to European tech innovation. Lots happening here that doesn't get enough coverage. Any suggestions for news sources or features you'd find useful?