More $$$ For Topix.net (via News.com)
Congrats to the Topix.net team. As we’ve said countless times on ResourceShelf, Topix.net is one of our favorite news resources. Today, the folks at Gannett along with the Tribune Co. and McClatchy have decided to invest another $15 million in Topix.net.

Topix.net has been (years in web time are equal to centuries elsewhere) a long time favorite news search tool of the ResourceShelf team. Why? A few, and we mean just a few, examples.

1) Coverage and scope: We find lots of material here FIRST well before we see it elsewhere. We see things here first (very timely) that in some cases we don’t find elsewhere at any time. Over 10,000 sources.

2) They have added blogs to their dbase but have carefully selected the publications.

3) Local and topical “pre-built” or, better put, automated generated pages for thousands of topics along with pre-built pages for all U.S. Zip Codes and most Canadian postal codes. Topix is building one impressive knowledge base. http://www.topix.net/city/chapel-hill-nc

4) If into the commenting scene, ability to comment with every post.

5) New, graphics that plot a topic over the year. If a story has been removed from the free web, it should also go from the graphic and database. Example: http://www.topix.net/search/?q=%22university+of+north+carolina%22

6) Topix.net NOW OFFERS CASE SENSITIVE SEARCH. So “sat” delivers diff results than SAT. Something you often don’t see on the web.

7) As advanced searches go, not a bad effort: http://www.topix.net/topix/advanced-search

RSS for each topic or prebuilt search

We could go on but we will leave it here for now.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Web Search. 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.