Recently Yahoo, Google, and MSN have made all kinds of news of their own when it comes to their search engines and advertising programs. However, instead of just making news, all of these top Internet enterprises have also taken on the task of indexing and making news searchable using their respected search technologies and partnerships.
Today Yahoo officially launched their Yahoo News Search 2.0 in beta and has integrated it into the Yahoo Portal’s extremely active news site. Yahoo News Search draws in news stories from thousands of online news sources, combining articles from Yahoo! News and over 7,500 crawled news sources around the Web. The news service has been in beta since January, but was more or less made public today with a new search box placed at the top of the Yahoo News page along with search results generated from a news search on the Yahoo search engine.
Yahoo Search News 2.0 does not only index published news stories, but also offers multimedia news in both audio and video.
Yahoo is still giving AP and web newspaper sites top billing on the main Yahoo News page, but after testing they may follow Google and MSN’s path of using relevancy algorithms to determine the top stories shown from their index.
Google News is the pioneer in news search and has been live for over a year. Google News draws its news results from over 4,500 news sources worldwide and automatically arranged to present the most relevant news first. Google News offers a news service that has quietly become the pinnacle in online news search that is compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention.
According to Google News; “the headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer algorithm, based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web.” Google’s news service also lets readers subscribe to email news alerts and documents news photos along with top stories.
Microsoft’s MSN has also made a fine effort of indexing and making news stories searchable with their MSN Newsbot. Newsbot is in partnership with Moreover news syndication services and too gathers news from over 4,000 sources. Like Google News, MSN Newsbot clusters the top and most relevant news stories on their Newsbot main page. Currently in beta testing on the MSN’s UK network, Newsbot also has international versions throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. For a selected Spanish speaking US news audience, MSN offers Newsbot Latino.
Whether your search engine or Internet portal of choice is Google, Yahoo, or MSN… with these new news monitoring offerings most web users should be happy with their quest to get the news instantly and from multiple sources. In a time when search engines are focusing on local search functionality, paid search advertising, and social networking; we must not forget one of the oldest forms of informational publishing – the news.
