New Search Engine for News Searching

With the news that Excite's NewsTracker was folding up, a couple of news junkies gloomily e-mailed me asking if there were any other news search options out there. There's DayPop, of course, and Moreover, and MagPortal, and several others. And now there's a new one on the scene -- RocketNews at http://www.rocketnews.com/ .

I've gotten pretty jaded about news search engines, tell you the truth about it. All the ones I've seen don't have enough sources to suit my taste and not enough search options, either. RocketNews blasts out of the gate with over 3,000 sources; they won't give out their list but I'm told it's mostly regular news sites with very few Web logs. Unfortunately the free RocketNews is the merest taste of the paid version of RocketNews, but the free version is worth using.

The interface is Googlesimple; a query box and a pulldown menu to specify the age of the stories for which you're searching (between one and five days.) I did a search for "anthrax" and got -- no kidding -- 618 articles. That's for 1 day old. For 5 days old I got 825 articles. Yipes.

RocketNews defaults to AND, searching for pinwheel anthrax found nothing. It unfortunately does not like quotes; enter quotes in your search and it'll strip them, then perform the search as an AND. (Confidential to RocketNews: you need at least a basic help file for your search interface.) I couldn't figure out how to specify NOT in a search, either.

If you just want to browse, there's a category browse at http://www.rocketnews.com/register-bin/agnitio_categories.cgi . The categories are available in a series of pulldown menus. I found this feature all right, but nothing to write home about; they had "portal" as a category, for example, and not search engines.

If the free version of RocketNews got your interest, you might want to check out the advanced version. Subscription fees start at $150 (Canadian) per month for access to the advanced features. You can also sign up for headline news for your website and an e-newsletter service, but that's priced based on volume.

The advanced service -- aha, offers a better search interface (you can use a series of query boxes to exclude search terms), the ability to have articles e-mailed to you, and more. I still couldn't figure out how to specify phrases and there was some lagging in load times for the advanced service. But the management of services was nice, with tabs being used to make several services quickly available. This advanced service is priced too high for individual researchers but corporate and institutional librarians may want to take a look at it.

The cons are that RocketNews only offers a limited amount of free searching and its search syntax isn't easy to understand. The pros are that it has 3000 sources and is easy to use if you're doing simple keyword searches. A nice complement to DayPop; worth a look.

Posted to Publications-Search