Google's finally launched a news search. It's in beta at http://news.google.com/ . This news search scrapes 100 sources about once an hour, and allows you to search through almost seven days' worth of material.
I liked the collection of headlines on the front page, and the summaries seemed useful and readable. But at the same time -- only a hundred sources? And you can't restrict searches to a particular time (all stories scraped in the last day, last three days, etc.) Nate Tyler, Google's PR Manager, tells me that Google will be adding more news sources in the future. He also reminded me that the news search is in beta and that Google welcomes feedback and feature requests from users.
That isn't to say that this search isn't worth it. Some of the Google syntaxes work -- allintitle: finds words in the news headlines, while site: restricts your search to a particular news site. I wish allinurl: was supported instead, because then you could just enter a partial url (like BBC) instead of having to know the entire source URL.
I found the searches pretty good. I found some things I haven't seen in AllTheWeb or RocketNews (which seems to support phrase searching now; yay!) Results include the source and the date of the site and a note if registration is required. Stories don't appear to be cached; drat!
Considering all the news search sources that have sprung up lately, Google's playing catch-up. It'll be interesting to see how this site evolves over the next couple months.
==========================================================
ResearchBuzz is copyright 2002 Tara Calishain. All rights reserved. For information on reproducing items from this newsletter, please visit http://www.researchbuzz.com/about.html#reproducing . Subscription instructions are available at: http://www.researchbuzz.com/