Search Tip Report: Information You Can Use

A monthly newsletter from Eipert Information Services

June 2004 Number 5

Search Tips Report was a free email newsletter from Eipert Information Services, featuring practical tips about business and sci/tech information sources and research strategy for you to apply in your own business. See the archive of past issues.

In This Issue

* News for Business Research
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News--local or national, general or trade--is a source of obvious value to anyone in business. Follow industry trends and economic issues. Search for a local newspaper article which discusses a competitor's plans, or find an an announcement of a personnel change or new product for competitive intelligence.

Current, near real-time, news can be browsed and searched on the Web.

Note that this article covers sources for current news only. News more than a couple weeks or months old is extremely valuable when researching a company or an industry, however, the most comprehensive sources for this historic news are not free. Fee-based systems, some of which are paid for by local library systems and made available to their patrons, others of which are available by subscription to individuals, and particularly the professional search systems LexisNexis, Factiva and Dialog, are necessary for comprehensive business research. (See the June 2004 paper "Free, Fee-Based and Value-Added Information Services", by Mary Ellen Bates at http://www.factiva.com/collateral/download_brchr.asp?node=menuElem1506#white.)

Don't expect the free Web to have everything. But it does have a lot of very timely information. Here are some ways to locate the news that is pertinent to your need:

Current news

When searching for news, a standard search engine is not the best site to use!

On September 11, 2001, people searched Google for "World Trade Center", and only found items such as office rental information until, hours after the attack, links to news sources such as CNN and the Washington Post were manually added to the home page, along with a suggestion to use TV and radio for the most current news. (See http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2164171 for more information). The simple fact is that it takes search engines time to crawl the web and update their indexes, so a general purpose search was useless for extremely current news. Today general purpose search engines may crawl news sites more often, and they may integrate news searches with the results from a regular search, but search services designed specifically for news do a much better job at finding current events in a timely fashion. They crawl news sites only, and update their information many times during the day--in some cases every few minutes.

Besides providing a way to search for specific news, news sites provide front pages to use for scanning headlines and browsing the latest news.

General news

Among the many good news search sites, good ones to start with include Danny Sullivan's News Search Award Winners (September 2003) (http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156261). The award winners are: Google News (http://news.google.com/), Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com/), AllTheWeb News (http://www.alltheweb.com/?cat=news), AltaVista News (http://news.altavista.com/) and Daypop (http://www.daypop.com/).

Recently, Yahoo has introduced a new version, and Yahoo and Google are currently battling it out over which offers the most comprehensive news searches: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3328971

Subject specialty news searches.

As discussed in the April/May issue of Search Tips Report (http://www.eipertinfo.com/newsletter/newsletter2004-04.htm), niche search engines, or those specialized by subject, can provide relevant information. Some subject specialty sites include news search engines; some news search sites provide subject specialty sections. Just a few examples follow.

Topix.net (http://www.topix.net) is one of the largest news search engines, and offers good categorized topic-specific news. Of special business interest are the industry, local and company pages. Choose from a large number of industries at the business news section of topix.net, or chooose a localized page for an area of interest to see local news. Enter a company name in the search box to find if there is a specialized page dedicated to that company.

FindLaw (http://news.findlaw.com/) and Law.com (http://www.law.com) both provide access to legal news plus additional articles or commentary.

Hoovers (http://www.hoovers.com), a good source for basic company information, provides links to general business news selected by their editors and lists of news stories about specific companies. Their industry news sections are for subscribers only.

Other features to watch for.

Personalization: at some sites you can personalize your own news front page so that it includes of just the categories that you want. "My Yahoo" (http://my.yahoo.com) is an example of a personalized page containing your choice of content, including news from Yahoo--and, in beta, any RSS newsfeed.

Newsfeeds: headlines and summaries delivered to your desk using RSS. Watch for the orange XML symbol to find news pages that offer RSS feeds (topix.net pages are an example). For more about RSS, see http://www.forbes.com/technology/2004/02/23/cx_ah_0223tentech.html.

Patterns in the news.

For a unique categorized visual view of the current news from Google check out Newsmap (http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm). According to the site, Newsmap will "reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments". It attempts to visually demonstrate the unseen patterns in news media, and to actually display the bias of overall news coverage.

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