You may have noticed the news tiles displayed in the Cliqz Browser when you open a new tab. If you move your mouse cursor over a headline, a short teaser text will appear. Clicking on it will take you straight to the full story. But how and by whom are these stories actually selected and generated?

“Top News” informs Cliqz users about the most important events of the day. All linked articles originate from respected and trustworthy news domains within the respective countries, e.g. New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN for the U.S. or BBC, The Guardian, and Sky News for UK.

In order to determine the most relevant news for our users, we first collect and process all articles that were published by these sources, which we then compare among each other and form clusters around current events. The magnitude of these events, their presence on homepages of different news outlets and their time of publication results into a list of Top News, updated hourly to let you be on top of the news.

Sometimes breaking news is displayed at the first Top News position. It is clearly labeled for fast recognition. In order to be able to display such breaking news as soon as possible, we have developed our own engine, which is listening for alerts in the social media accounts of the major news publishers. As soon as the publishers release any breaking news, we can instantly pass these latest events on to you. First, our Cliqz editors will select the most relevant ones from the flood of breaking news.

Initially, only two versions of Top News were available: German and International (English language). If your browser language was German, you saw headlines of German news domains on the start page and each new tab. This also applied if no value was specified for the browser parameter “locale”. For all other language settings, Cliqz showed a mix of UK and U.S. news sources, mainly depending on the time of the day. We recently added French Top News and separate versions for U.S. and UK media, too. Future launches of Cliqz in additional countries will be accompanied with the respective regional Top News.

If desired, you can change the language of news – also called the “edition” of news – that are displayed in your browser. This may come in handy if you prefer to read news in a language other than your browser language (what’s the default setting) or if the automatic language detection failed. The option can be found at the bottom of the Cliqz Tab settings menu. Open it by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right corner of a new tab. Via the menu, you can switch between German media, German media in English, French media, UK media, U.S. media, and International media (mix of UK & U.S.).