MSN's Newsbot Gets Some New Features

MSN's Newsbot, which is in Beta in the UK, has some new features. You can check out the news search at http://uk.newsbot.msn.com/ .

First thing you'll notice is that the layout is rather different from the Google News layout. It looks like a cross between a news search layout and a newspaper. There's a large picture, and story links, and some thumbnails of other images. Colored dividers separate stories of various topics.

There's also a personalized story feature. On the right, there's a green box that lets you search for news. (It also displays your history after you start searching.) Once you pick news stories to read and reload the page, that box displays stories in which you might be interested. I found this worked so-so; I wasn't clear on why reading a story about savings plans was leading to a story about John Stamos' divorce. Thankfully every suggested story has a little "why" icon so you can understand the logic behind the choice.

All stories have their own stats as well. These include time it was indexed, how popular it is and number of similar stories. If you want to read more specific stories than the variety of topics on the front page, refer to the tabs on the side which include pointers to specific topics (including a most popular tab.)

The site seems much improved and I like the new layout and tabs. Three complaints: there doesn't seem to be a search result count, I don't see a way to list results by date, and the Web search and News search forms are too close to each other on the results page.

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