Topix has been one of our top destinations for open web news searching since it launched in 2004. At the end of last year, Gary offered a review of what was a very busy and impressive 2005 on SEW Blog.

Recently and as announced in this blog post the Topix team have made some more exciting moves, further solidifying Topix as a top choice for open web news searching. You can learn more here and here about their NewsRank algorithm

A quick review:

+ Topix is now constantly crawling over 50,000 sources. Both mainstream news and selected blogs. Blogs are identified with a “B” logo next to it. Nice.

+ Topix.net continues to offer pre-built topical pages for every U.S. Zip Code, most Canadian Postal Codes and thousands of topics from Information Technology to All Terrain Vehicles to Mobile Homes.

+ Browse many topics here using this directory.

+ We’re also very impressed with the fact that one click on a results page hides or makes visible duplicate articles. Very useful. You can also limit to blog or news sources with just a click.

+ Histograms are now available to help you narrow your search by date.

+ Topix.net now recognizes upper and lower case distinctions. Hooray! Case sensitive search. For example sat vs. SAT. This will make advanced searchers quite pleased.

+ Topix is crawling the full HTML which is a plus when searching news since many RSS feeds (what some sites limit their crawl to) only contain a portion of the article.

+ If an article is no longer available (it has been removed from the web), you’ll still might find a link but the full text will be gone or (in some cases) you’ll find a link to purchase the text.

+ Comment: We would love to see the advanced interface reflect the ability to search over a longer period of time. Right now, you’re given a max 30-day limit. The historgram offers a year.

What about Free? Check your Library for Remote Access to Databases
+++ Of course, more powerful (in terms of searchability and depth of archives) are services like Factiva, Nexis*, and Dialog** and in many cases, the databases offerered for FREE from public libraries offer more advanced features, much much deeper archives, in many cases PDF’s of the actual pages, etc. Remember, each library offers different databases. However, if you can spare about 5 minutes to get a library card. Your all set. These databases are:
+ Available 24×7 from home or office.
+ Licensed for personal use
+ Some of these archives go back 5 or 10 years. Some even longer.
+ In some cases, it’s not only articles but also full text books and audio books that you can download to your MP3 player.
+ Not just a U.S. thing. We know of libraries in Canada, Australia and elsewhere offering such services.
+ One database we have access to offers over 57 million articles. Many of them free, full text. Some are even full image (download as PDF).
These two articles have much more.
1 ||| 2 ****

Bottom Line: Topix.net continues to IMPRESS. A must for the serious open web news searcher. Kudos to Rich, Chris, and the rest of the team.

* Nexis offers a credit card service where you can search for free but are charged to download an article.

** Dialog, a supermarket of databases, offers several (not all) files in the same manner. Free to search, download and pay for the content.

UPDATE: August 31, 2006
Danny Sullivan comments here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.