Legal Research

Newssift - promising new business news search engine

By scott

The FT has launched a new business news search engine called Newssift. Newssift indexes about 4,000 business news sources, from online newspapers and blogs to news portals and research sites. It is ingesting about 120,000 articles a day right now and applying semantic tags to each one. In the end it can categorize each article by business topic, organization, place, person, and theme.

You can enter a search term, or choose from news topics - random topics currently in news in the Business, Organisation, Place, Person, and Theme categories . If you put in a search term, all these topic boxes are then populated with any matching terms. For example, I put ‘Clifford Chance’ in the search box and got hits on Organisation and Person.

Clicking on the Organisation link, it ran a search returning 25 articles. The search can now be further refined by adding additional terms yourself or by selecting additional terms that have appeared in the original 5 category boxes.

The search results also provide two pie charts - one ranking whether the articles are positive, negative or neutral and one detailing where the articles come from.

This has a lot of promise. The Faceted search approach is a good one. Whilst is by no means perfect out of the box, it is certainly worth keeping an eye on and adding to you list of news search tools.

Full post as published by Information Overload on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).