More than 20 years ago I was working on a travel startup, world66, and in the process I got a list of all countries and their coordinates. Geo on the internet was young, so this was non-trivial. So I wondered what else you could do with this data. Back then you could scrape Google News if your Python script claimed to be Internet Explorer 5.5, so that was easy enough to code up.
I didn't think about it much afterwards, but it ended up causing some important ripples. For one thing, Rich Gibson and Schuyler Erle were working on a book on Mapping Hacks and this seemed to fit, so they asked me to write a section on it. Nice enough by itself, but that gave me an in with O'Reilly which later led to the publication of my Deep Learning Cookbook.
Even more importantly, the project made its way to the Googleplex on the other side of the planet. The people working on Google News saw my little map and figured they should either sue this guy or hire him. Luckily, they went with the second option. Half a year later I joined the mothership.
As the king of search, Google became really good at scraping other sites. They also became really good at stopping others from doing the same. That irony killed my little News Map project, of course. Setting the user agent header no longer did the trick, so I dropped it from the line-up. I did some dabbling on Google News itself, but the map never became a feature.
I left Google a long time ago, and while Google has made it harder to use their data externally in general, there's still a Google News RSS feed. And even classic machine learning has come a long way — entity extraction can do a lot better than just matching country names. Geocoding is a thing now. Throw it all together, ask goose to turn it into an app, and boom, the Google News Map is back.
This one is better than the old one. The map is zoomable, it keeps headlines around for 24 hours, and it has a much better geocoder. Still, it's interesting that the original was 58 lines. And hand coded.