SurfWax Has a News Search Too

After all this talking about news search, the folks at SurfWax dropped me a note to let me know that they have a news search too. Theirs includes an interesting feature called LookAhead. SurfWax' news search is available at http://news.surfwax.com .

There are over 100,000 topic pages here, I'm told, and two ways to search them using the query boxes at the top right and left of the page. If you're just searching for topics, use the box on the left. As you start typing, the box in the middle of the page will start filling up with suggestions. If I type baseball, for example, I'll get dozens of topics in the box, including baseball gloves, toys, and lots of location-based baseball news. Click on the topic in which you're interested and click Go, and I'll be taken to a page of news about that topic. In the case of baseball gloves, the news links go back to September 2003. The listings include title, date, and source of the story, and a very brief summary.

The box on the right of the front page is for -- well, it's not really for full text searching. But you can search all the summaries of the stories by entering query words here. A search for baseball in this instance found over 7000 results. There are a couple of disconcerting things with this search, however. a) The search results come from Google. Wubba? (I'm told that SurfWax is implementing their own internal engine and this'll change.) b) You have to dig through the pages of stories to find the one which matched your keyword. Choose your queries carefully.

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