The majority of search engines will provide you with up to date news and
current affairs information. Yahoo! has a
section which is entitled Daily News with sections on Top Stories, Business,
Technical, Politics, World affairs, Local news, Entertainment, Sports, Science,
Health, and Full Coverage.
Within the section on Business, their news
stories are broken down into sections such as News sources, Related Full
Coverage, Opinions and Editorials (taken from leading US news sources such as
the Los Angeles Times) Audio and Video stories. As well as providing major news
stories of the day they provide links to appropriate web sites.
It is also
possible to set up your own series of news alerts, which can be personally
defined by yourself. You can choose from a variety of different subject areas
such as Business and Finance, Sports, Reference tools and so on.
If you
prefer to have a rather more UK oriented service,
Yahoo! UK also provides a news service
with a similar selection of subject areas.
This can be a very useful way of
keeping up to date with what is happening in the news at any given moment in
time.
I think Yahoo! offers one of the best services of this type, but many of
the other search engines also provide the same sort of service;
AltaVista for example has sections
covering Asia-Pacific, Business features, Business news, Consumer, Finance
features, Finance news, International, Internet features, Internet news, Media
news, Sports, Tech features, and Tech news. As well as providing news headlines
(and in common with Yahoo!) they have a facility allowing you to search for
recent news stories.
Once again, if you prefer a British approach to news
information sources AltaVista UK
provides with with this facility, but I have to say that I don't think that it
is generally as good as the Yahoo! versions.
Northern Light also has a top stories section and you can select news from the last 2 hours, todays news, or the last fortnight. However, their news does tend to be orientated towards US news. Northern Light also as a 'special collection' which you can choose from when you're searching, providing you with access to news from over 5,000 different journals and periodicals. You can get to read a short summary, but if you want the full text you have to pay for the service - unless of course you have that particular journal in your collection already, in which case it acts as a useful periodical index!
Lycos is another search engine which provides useful business based information news stories and has sections on Business information as well as Entertainment, Sports and so on, with a newsfeed taken from Reuters.
Finally, Excite has a News Tracker service which allows you to create a personalized news clipping service that scours the web to deliver news on the subjects you want, from hundreds of online newspapers and magazines.
All of the above offerings by search engines can, to a greater or lesser
extent, be classed as personalised news services, but the disadvantage with
them is that they are quite limited in their coverage, and you have little, if
any option, of choosing the news resources that they use. One service which
stands out is CRAYON, or Create your own
newspaper. This service allows you to personalise your own information sources,
subject areas and so on. This allows you to chose from about 16 different
subject areas, and to also decide which news services you require.
Another
useful resource is the Infogate newstracking
service.
CNN also offers a news service, excitingly called
MyCNN.
The
Infojunkie is a news resource that can
be incorporated into your browser, delivering the latest news stories directly
to your browser bar.
There are literally thousands of news resources on the Internet - far
too many to mention, but
Media UK is an
excellent resource which allows you to track down local or national newspapers,
radio stations, magazines and press releases. There are of course some
specialised news services such as Reuters,
the Press Association and of course the
good old BBC.
Newshub is updated every 15 minutes to
provide you with the latest news stories.
Newstrawler is a Parallel Search Engine
for news on the Internet.
Individual provides personalised news
stories, delivered directly to your desktop via email.
Once you've found a useful page, it can be a nuisance to have to keep going back to check it. A very nice service that I use is called Netmind (formally URL-Minder) and the facility called Mind-it allows users to keep a track of particular pages that interest them and to be informed by email when that particular page changes.
Bots, also known as robots or intelligent agents can make life a lot
easier when it comes to keeping up to date. Perhaps the best single resource
for information on these utilities can be found at Botspot which describes and lists hundreds of
them. One that I use frequently is the
Informant This allows you to
create favourite searches using your preferred search engines, and at periodic
times it runs the search on your behalf and informs you by email of any new
pages that it has found. Another useful utility is called
Karnak, which although it's a commercial
service does allow you to have one or two free searches.
CyberAlert is an Internet monitoring and
alerting service for market intelligence. It tracks information on your company
(or any other that interests you) by checking websites, mailing lists,
newsgroups and other resources for you. However, it is quite an expensive
service.
Intelligent agents are utilities which (generally) are downloaded onto your own system. These can be used to search a very wide variety of information resources for the latest news and information in a subject area and they can also be programmed to run searches at particular times for you. A nice example of this is Lexibot
A good place to start a search for new information is at the National Academic Mailing List Service, or if that doesn't provide you with the information that you require, you might try Google Groups (this service was formerly known as DejaNews.
Your best starting point for subject based information of a very high quality is an appropriate Virtual Library, and a good list of these can be found at Pinakes.
If you are reading this as a paper handout, the URL for the live version
is at http://www.philb.com
Last updated 16/7/01