Topix Weblog

August 7, 2006

Biggest Index, Most Sources, Best News Search – Our Dial Goes to 11

by tolles at 9:28 AM

We've just launched a totally new version of the Topix.net News Search - adding an index of news and blog results going back over a year, and providing a click-o-gram (interactive histogram) of news results giving people a view from the past few minutes all the way back to over a year ago. Also, for the true search geek, we're giving you case sensitive search on those results - enabling searches for news about "IT" that were not previously possible. This is all on top our 50,000 sources of main stream news and blogs, and providing news not only about national topics, but local stories for 50,000 cities and towns across the world.

You can't get this across the street. :-)

There are a couple of "first on the net" here - You can't get more than 30 days or so of general news results anywhere except paid services, and if you're looking to know what's going on with a topic you care about, we think adding a year of results is pretty cool. Likewise, no one else out there provides a histogram of results for a year. And our histogram is interactive - a click-o-gram - where you can navigate to the dates in question and look back to a spike of stories about what you care about.

Also, if you want to search for what it takes on the SAT on the way to MIT for a gig in IT, you're going to love the case-sensitive search. Try bush -Bush to search for shrubs but not George W. (The case folding rules are: all lowercase matches anything, capitalized matches capitalized or all caps, and all caps matches only all caps.)

Great Place to Launch a Search Product

In a bit of self imposed deadline, we wanted our new news search to go live by, well, today. Search Engine Strategies, San Jose (link to http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/summer06/) starts today, and I'm on a panel (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/summer06/agenda2.html#330-4) August 8th about the news and blog search engines. (Come on by and say "hi" if you're down there) We wanted to throw down so we had something to say at the show, and this is it.

Also, we had the privilege of having Danny Sullivan in last Thursday. We've know Danny since we were running dmoz.org (link to dmoz.org), and participated in the first Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco. He's remained the dean of search analysts, and talking to him about what'd going on in the world of search, media and advertising was a lot of fun.

Anyway, have at it - and tell us what you think.