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Tales from the Terminal RoomMay 2003, Issue No. 43 |
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Please Note: This is an archive copy of the newsletter. The information and links that it contains are not updated.
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Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X May 2003, Issue No. 43 Editor: Karen Blakeman Published by: RBA Information Services Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. In this issue:
News on the Web ComparedIntroductionWith so many online newspapers starting to charge for content and search engines providing free current news from across the world, keeping up with what is available and at what price has become increasingly difficult. This review looks at what some of the "content aggregators" and the individual publishers are offering. The selection is a personal one and UK biased. My apologies if I have omitted your favourite newspaper but there is not enough space to do them all justice. I have concentrated on 8 UK based news sources (BBC, Evening Standard, The Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Times and the Scotsman). I also looked at some of the content aggregators both free and priced (AlltheWeb, Google News, LexisNexis Europe, Newsbase BBC World Monitoring, NewsNow, Yahoo! News, Worldchambers - Dialog). In all cases, I was interested in the free and pay-as-you-go options. The criteria for comparison were:
Summary and ConclusionsRather than bore you with all the details at the start of this review, I have cut straight to the summary and conclusions. Details for each of the services are towards the end of this survey. There is no overall best service so I have assessed the usefulness of the services in providing current news, alerts, free archives and priced archives. Current News If you are looking for searchable current news, then there are plenty of free options. The most comprehensive free current news service is Google (http://news.google.com/). It has over 4,500 news sources, worldwide coverage and now has some country specific news sites including one for the UK. The only one of my UK news sources not covered by Google is the Evening Standard. The last 30 days of news are covered but you will not be able to access articles covered by subscriptions, for example Financial Times stories older than 3 days. These are clearly marked in the results list as such. The default is to sort by relevance and there is an automated grouping process that pulls together related headlines under one entry. The search options are limited (keyword searching of full text only) but that is not generally an issue as results are, on the whole, highly relevant. AlltheWeb (FAST)(http://www.alltheweb.com/), which predates Google in providing a news service, has failed to keep up in terms of coverage and time span (7 days) but it does have some interesting local and regional content. There are also advanced search features that I would have expected Google to support. NewsNow (http://www.newsnow.co.uk/) currently has 9527 sources and goes back one month. NewsNow is fine for browsing headlines but the free search only supports a single term search of the headlines. To get the most out of this service, including more flexible searching, alerts and news feeds, you need to subscribe. (There are no prices on the Web site.) The BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/) is a very popular current news service with links to related BBC news stories and relevant third party sites. (Articles go back to 1997 but you may find that some of the internal and external links no longer work with the older articles.) Yahoo! News UK (http://www.yahoo.co.uk/) has 7-10 days of searchable current news. If you have a favourite newspaper, most of them offer at least a few days free content:
Alerts Current awareness and alerting services come in a variety of forms and levels of customisation:
Free Archive News For the coverage of free "archive" news, I looked for stories that are older than 3 months. Starting with the most comprehensive archive, the findings were:
Priced Archive News The clear winner here was LexisNexis by credit card (http://www.lexis-nexis.co.uk/). It has a time span of 20 years and covers over 5000 sources, including all of the newspapers covered by this review. There is even a separate option for searching the FT and Global News Wire. As well as a general news search, there are options for searching for news on companies, people, products and within industry sectors. You do have to be very specific, though, in your search: if your results exceed 1000 you are told to refine your search further. Be careful how you structure your strategy. LexisNexis automatically treats your search terms as a complete phrase so, for example, richard branson balloons will be searched as Richard immediately followed by branson immediately followed by balloons. You need to use Boolean operators such as 'and' 'or' in your search strategy (details of this are in a help file on the LexisNexis Web site). Articles cost US$ 2.50 each and payment is by credit card. If you are more interested in the emerging markets, the BBC World Monitoring Service is an excellent starting point and available as a pay as you go option at http://www.newsbaseworldmonitoring.com/. This service covers 3000 sources from 150 countries and includes newspapers, press releases, TV and radio broadcasts. Foreign language reports are translated into English without any interpretation or "spin". As with LexisNexis you must use Boolean 'and', 'or', otherwise your terms are treated as an exact phrase. BBC World Monitoring is covered by LexisNexis but articles from the Newsbase service are generally cheaper and start at an average of 6-7 pence each. Service DetailsContent Aggregators(The news source codes referred to under "Coverage" are: BB=BBC News, ES=Evening Standard, FT=Financial Times, GU=The Guardian, ID=The Independent, TE=The Telegraph, TI=The Times Online, SC=The Scotsman) Service: AlltheWeb Service: Google News Service: LexisNexis Europe
Service: NewsBase
- BBC Monitoring Service: NewsNow Service: Yahoo! News UK Service: Worldchambers
- Dialog Individual News Sources Service: BBC News Service: Evening Standard
(London) Service: Financial Times Service: Guardian Unlimited
Service: The Independent Service: The Scotsman
Service: The Telegraph
Service: Times Online
KillerInfoKillerInfo (http://www.killerinfo.com/) is a relatively new meta search tool. (A meta search tool takes your query and runs it across several search engines at once.) Meta search tools are nothing new but this one has some useful features and, on the whole, comes back with relevant results. Every search automatically generates a "Search Result Guide" that is displayed to the right of the Web site listings. This acts as a "Table of Contents" and clusters the results by topic and Web site, making it easier to find relevant pages. In addition, the Quick Peek link to the right of every site in the results opens up a preview of the page below the listing title. Rather than having to open and close new browser windows to look at a page you can quickly preview multiple sites "in-line". For some reason, though, the Quick Preview link does not display in Mozilla and some Netscape browsers, so this feature is only available to Explorer and Opera users. KillerInfo claims to access more than 13,000 sites, including databases that are usually missed by other tools. These are divided into "channels" such as "Web", Business, Research, Health, Science and Government. Apart from the Web channel, which is International in coverage, these are either heavily or totally US biased. There are, though, links to some country specific search tools. Is it in any good? Having tried out a number of test searches I have found that it does appear to come up with relevant results most of time. The clustering is a big plus, but you may find with some searches that "sponsored links" - paid for placements - appear at the top of the results list. I doubt that it will replace Google as the number one search tool, but it comes a close second and is worth considering when Google fails. Information ResourcesNews http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/news.htm Google Launches Country News Services Google has launched country versions of its popular news service. As well as news tailored for Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the US there is also one for the UK (http://news.google.co.uk/) The search and display features are the same as news.google.com but the stories that are automatically shown when you log on are biased towards the country that it is serving. Company Directories (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/directs.htm) Faust Information - National, International Directories and Mailing
Lists Faust is a distributor of international address data CD ROMs, phonebooks and Yellow Pages. Products include residential listings, business (yellow) pages, mailing lists, listings by country and importers. Importers products include the well known International Importers Directory, and industry listings ranging from the agricultural sector to woodworking equipment. Prices vary depending on the level of detail and type of directory. There is no free information available on this Web site. If, though, you are trying to track down products for mailing applications or company information, particularly in more obscure industries and by country, this is a good place to start. Gizmo of the MonthWeb2Text - HTML to plain text converterhttp://www.jetman.dircon.co.uk/software/web2text.html If you ever need to convert a Web page or HTML document to plain text, try Web2Text. Yes, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer have options for doing exactly this, but both have a nasty habit of mangling the layout of the original document. Web2Text is a freeware tool that does what it says on the tin. Much of the structure of the HTML document can be retained after the conversion, for example paragraphs, header emphasis, URLs and you can mark italicised words with an * and bold with an underscore. (Both italics and bold markers can be customised). An excellent and very useful program - what more can one say? Meetings & WorkshopsWorkshop: Advanced Internet Search Strategies TFTTR Contact InformationKaren Blakeman, RBA Information Services ArchivesTFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/index.shtml Subscribe and UnsubscribeTo subscribe to the newsletter fill in the online registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml To unsubscribe, use the registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml and check the unsubscribe radio button. Privacy StatementSubscribers' details are used only to enable distribution of the newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. The subscriber list is not used for any other purpose, nor will it be disclosed by RBA or made available in any form to any other individual, organisation or company.
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| This page was last updated on 2nd June 2003 | 2003 |
