ResearchBuzz

Google News announced recently that you can now search by city/state and zip code to get news. I don’t know why they’re talking about this while not saying much about the location: syntax, but whatever. Let’s get local.

When I think of hyperlocal news search (zip-code level) I think Topix. You can do zip code news searches by using the Google News advanced search form at http://news.google.com/advanced_news_search . (Don’t try to do the searches from the main search form; you’ll get really wonky results.)

I did a search for 82001, which is Cheyenne Wyoming. I got 492 results, from what looked like mostly Cheyenne searches. But if I did the same search and restricted the results to Wyoming media (again using the advanced search form) I got far fewer results.

(By the way, if you want you can search for news about one zip code — say, 82001 — in media from another state — say, New York. When I tried this I got some irrelevant information but I also got legitimate news from other sources.)

Searching by city and state worked equally well; searching for Burlington Vermont found over 1900 results, again mostly from that state’s media.

Doing some location searching is all very well, but nothing I saw here is going to tear me away from Topix. On the other hand, I see plenty of opportunities to add Google’s various special searches to the location search. For example, I might decide I only want television station stories from my search — I could add source:tv to my geography-based search. I might want to add keywords that are restricted to headlines — like searching for 90210 and then adding intitle:strike to the search.

(It appears that you have to edit the searches from the advanced search pages. When I tried to change the keywords on the search result page, Google News lost its location searching.)

When it comes to news by location, I’m going to stick with Topix. But I do want to do some additional playing with Google News’ area-based news in conjunction with other special syntax.

Get some fake moolah and then make bets on news stories. Sounds kind of fun. A new site called Hubdub (and I’m sure I’m going to spell it “Hubbub” a million times, apologies in advance) is available at http://www.hubdub.com. It allows you to submit prediction-type questions, and bet fake bucks on the outcome of yours and other questions. The site’s free but requires registration.

From the front page you can see the variety of questions that have been asked, including “Will the US Spy Satellite crash into a built up area?” (Current bets are running towards no) and “Will the Writers Guild of America Strike end by February 29, 2008?” (Trending toward yes as a guess.) This summary page provides a bit of information, but far more interesting is the detail page, like the one for Will the MESSENGER probe discover evidence of water on Mercury?.

The detail page includes a graph for the predictions over time, as well as clarification for how exactly the question will be answered, comments on the story or the reasoning behind it, and news stories related to the question. (Hubdub monitors 10,000 news outlets and blogs for the stories; you can suggest sources as well.)

Sometimes the related stories are way off (see “Will Sunderland beat Birmingham in the Premiership League game on 29th of January”) but for the most part the relevancy is pretty good. I wouldn’t use this as my regular news source, but I did find some news stories I hadn’t seen otherwise (mostly the science-related sources and the question about whether Yahoo would make $150 million.)

Was it Deutsch Digitization Day and nobody told me? The latest German periodical to put its back issues online is Focus, a German news weekly. This archive is available at http://www.focus.de/magazin/archiv .

This archive contains everything from Focus back to 1993, with the exception of the current issue, which will be put online after a delay. You can do a full-text search by keyword, or narrow your search by section. Clicking on the “Erweiterte Sucheinstellungen” (More Search Options) link takes me to a 404 error.

I did a search for Republik. I got over 3100 results. Results are default listed by relevance, but can also be listed by what I think are date and section of the periodical. Clicking on the title of the article gives you an image of that issue’s cover and the text of the article — again, no actual page images. It looks like even in the archive you have the option to rate the article in addition to printing and e-mailing it.