RocketNews Relaunched Their News Search Engine

What is it with news search engines? Do they go in cycles? Early in the Internet we had some lovely news search engines, then a lot of them died off, then in mid-2001 we had another great resurgence, and then some of those went away, and now we've got another upcoming set. RocketInfo has announced this week the relaunch of their RocketNews search engine, available at http://www.rocketnews.com .

RocketNews allows searchers to limit their search by time different ways, to items published today, yesterday, or up to five days ago. That five days is a much smaller pool of articles than Google or Yahoo's news search, which are both thirty days. On the other hand, the database claims 10,000 news and information resources (RocketNews is now indexing Atom and RSS feeds in addition to traditional full-text resources.)

In addition to time limitations, searchers may also limit their queries to category and location (continent, basically). Tip to RocketNews. It's not necessary to have an "advanced search" and
a "more advanced search". That's an extra hoop that perhaps isn't necessary.

A five-day search for "Louis Freeh" found 0 results, but Louis Freeh found 1100 results, so I guess the lesson there is don't use quotes in your searching. Search results include title, source,date, and a good excerpt. A switch at the top of results allows you to turn duplicate articles returned on and off.

RocketNews is also now making search results available as RSS feeds. That's Daypop, Feedster, RocketNews, Yahoo, and bunches of others that now offer some level of RSS feeds. Meanwhile, Google's sending Julian Bond cease-and-desist notices about his GNews2RSS application ( http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3334651 ). Google, c'mon. Yes, I respect your terms of service but please, offer RSS feeds or update your API to search the Google News index.Charge for RSS! I don't care! I know Google News and AmphetaDesk could make beautiful music together.

Ahem. Back to RocketNews. Though the five-day limit is a bit of a bummer, the search results I got were good and I'm thrilled that I can get my search results as an RSS feed. Nicely done.

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