Checking In With RocketNews

Remember RocketNews? It's a news search engine available at http://www.rocketnews.com. While it's an interesting engine I don't search it that much, mostly because its news searches are limited to only four days (as opposed to 30 days for news search engines like Google News.)

I did have occasion to use it the other day however and I notice that in addition to news search, RocketNews is now offering blog, video, and audio/podcast search. While I found my results rather limited, this might be the place to go if you're looking for big-topic searches with a minimum of spam.

For the news search, I did a four-day search on guitar. For my search results I got 607 results, with sources including Market Wire, lots of results from the Edinburgh Evening News, and Diamondback Online On-Campus News. (For comparison, a May 4 - May 7 search for guitar on Google News brings 1,260 results at this writing.)

My blog search for guitar was extremely weird. RocketNews claimed to have no results, but provided a results count of 36 and a link to the next ten results. When I went to look at the next ten results, they were indeed there. It was the first ten that were missing. Blog results included Slashdot, Wonkette, Boing Boing, and nothing in the line of spam I could see.

When I looked at the audio/podcast search I wondered if Rocket was searching transcripts or descriptions. The answer appears to be descriptions; search results for guitar included eleven results including a very nice two-hour podcast on contemporary and traditional Hawaiian music. (Details at http://hawaiianeye.blogspot.com/.) All of the results I got seemed to be podcasts, but that might be because of my keyword.

Finally, the video search for guitar found only three results, all music videos from the same source. The limitations of date and results would make this a pretty confining search if I was trying to do something through, but I was trying to research a big news story and had absolutely no way to narrow down my query, the high-quality sources here would be very useful.

Posted to Publications-Search