So, what’s new?

Now when certain words, places, and names in the news are searched you’ll not only find direct links to news stories from the Yahoo News database but also:

+ News Photos (from a variety of sources)
+ News Video (from a variety of sources)
+ Recent Tweets

Here are Two Examples:

+ Barack Obama
+ U.S. Senate

Sterling reports that Yahoo is running their own algorithm to assist in filtering out Twitter “noise.”

That said, Yahoo really should show more Twitter results when possible. As of today, they only show two and then provide a link to run a search on the Twitter database.

The ResourceShelf team wants to spend some quality time with Xyggy but here’s a brief overview.

The primary concept in play is the belief that, “search should be item-based not just text-based.” What’s an item?

Documents, web pages, images, music, publications, medical records, proteins, news articles, people profiles, movies, products, sounds, newswires, patents, books, customer profiles, legal cases, resumes and many more are all examples of items.

The explanation on home page continues:

A text search returns web pages or documents containing the keywords in ranked order. Item search returns similar items in ranked order.

Text search is fine, to a point, but we live in a world of items not just keywords. Item search provides substantial advantages and additional information over keyword search. Item search is a more natural way of finding things.

Xyggy is about finding similar content.

Here’s a List of the Databases Xyggy Currently Makes Available:

+ Xyggy Patent (U.S. Patents Granted, 1976-Present)
The service debuted late summer, 2009. Here’s an overview.
The autocomplete feature is very useful. It’s available with all Xyggy databases

From Xyggy Research Labs:

+ Xyggy Articles

Articles from 20 years of the New York Times from 1987 to 2007. Debuted about a month ago.

+ Xyggy Legal (Debuted a Week Ago)

Cases covered include:
+ United States Supreme Court:
+ United States Reporter (U.S.): 1 – 544
+ United States Circuit Courts of Appeal:
+ Federal Reporter, Second Series (F.2d): 178 – 999
+ Federal Reporter, Third Series (F.3d): 1 – 491
Case coverage is incomplete for recent years and Xyggy will endeavor to complete the collection in the future.

The interface for all data collections consists of a search box (where you search for similar patents, articles, etc.) with a box directly below it that is populated with results.

More on Xyggy in the near future.

UPDATE: The Out of the Jungle post includes some comments from the Xyggy CEO.

He writes:

With item-search you are literally passing an entire document as the query. In fact with Xyggy, queries can contain one or more documents and it will find all similar documents in ranked order. Xyggy is a different search paradigm and as such is not comparable to how text-search works.

Text-search with or without advanced options finds documents containing the query keywords. But, do users want to find documents with specific keywords or do they want to find similar documents? Maybe they want to do both but only the former option has been available to date.

In honor of Sesame Streets 40th Birthday, here’s a Newsy report based on stories from:

+ Wall Street Journal

+ CNN

+ New York Times

+ San Francisco Chronicle

+ Fox News Detroit

+ Buffalo News

+ and The Jimmy Kimmel Show

At the top of the page note the direct links to several of the underlying stories and directly below the search box you’ll find the transcript of the Newsy video report.

Source: Newsy

See Also: Resource of the Week: Review the News Using Multiple Sources with Newsy (Beta)

Ed. Note: We posted the following item last weekend. After using Newsy for another week, we believe it deserves to be a Resource of the Week and is also deserving of your attention.

Here’s an idea we haven’t seen before. We were a skeptical at first but after a short time we can say we like what Newsy is up to. The current version of the service has been available since April, 2009 when it was relaunched. The Newsy iPhone app launched a couple of weeks ago.

The idea is as simple and and fresh. We’ve not seen anything similar available for free. Basically, take stories in the news and then bring together multiple video (and sometimes text-based) news reports from a number of sources and place them all on a single location. It’s not only a great way to see how a news story is reported but viewing the same story from different news organizations can potentially turn up facts from one source that the other source does not report on. By the way, the company likes to think to think of themselves as “news analyzer” and not a news aggregator. We think both phrases can work together Whatever you call Newsy there is plenty of value here.

Newsy can be useful in many situations. One potential use is helping to teach critical information skills by reviewing what is and is not reported on in a news story and how it’s reported. For example, how much time does each source give to the story.

But wait, there’s more. In addition to aggregating news reports on the same story, Newsy produces their OWN original video content summarizing the material from each source into a single report. For those who don’t want to view each source video one at a time, here’s a way to learn what each one is reporting in just a minute or two.

You can keyword search Newsy (you’re searching metadata) or browse by one of seven categories:

+ World
+ Economy
+ U.S.
+ Politics
+ Tech/Sci
+ Environment
+ Culture

You can also sort results by:

+ Most Popular
+ Most Recent
+ Most Commented
+ Highest Rated
+ Editor’s Picks

Let’s review how Newsy works:

1] Find a story, search or browse
We searched for “Obama” and got back 10 results.

2] Select the story; We chose “Obama Gives Donors Access to White House” from October 29, 2009 with a video summary that runs about three minutes.

3] After clicking the play we were taken to this page.

5] Immediately, Newsy’s own video summary begins playing.

6] Above the video box (which can be embedded on any web page) notice the direct links to the various news sources used in the summary.

7] In this case the sources are:

+ Fox News
+ The Hill (Text-Based)
+ CNN
+ The Washington Times
+ CBS
+ The Washington Post

A good and well-balanced selection of sources. If you click on any of them, a new window opens and the “source” video (or text) begins playing. Text sources link directly to the article. No more going all over the web to find the content.

Quick Hits

+ Newsy does not offer its services for every news story. That’s minor when you sit back and review what we think is real value in what they offer. Hopefully, they’ll be able to cover more in the future.

+ An iPhone version of Newsy is also available. It’s a free app. Here’s a link to get Newsy iPhone (via the iTunes App Store).

+ If you register for the site you can comment on any story.

+ A text transcript of each Newsy original summary is available. You’ll find it below the summary video box.

+ You can share reports using direct links to many social networks or e-mail a link to the selected story.

+ An RSS feed of stories is available as well as the Newsy blog.1

We hope that Newsy continues to offer a wide variety sources and a well-balanced set of sources for each story it covers. One thing we would love to see is a source list (we’re guessing the Newsy uses more sources than listed on this page) and perhaps the expansion of this page about how news stories are selected. Another page about the news source selection process would be useful. Finally, we would be very happy if you could view stories by source. In other words, show me all of the stories that use video from MSNBC, BBC, CBS, etc.

You can learn more about the company this STLToday article. For example, they are based in Columbia, MO and have a staff (as of a few weeks ago) of 19.

Many Thanks to Charles Knight over at AltSearchEngines for letting us know about Newsy.
Yesterday, Charles ran a post about Newsy focusing on the success of their iPhone app.

Google News has dropped the “Text Version” feature sometime over the past week or so. A Google News Help thread has some complaints dating back to October 22nd. More in the full post including a comment from Google

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

The idea is as simple and and fresh. We’ve not seen anything similar available for free. Basically, take stories in the news and then bring together multiple video (and sometimes text-based) news reports from a number of sources and place them all on a single location. It’s not only a great way to see how a news story is reported but viewing the same story from different news organizations can potentially turn up facts from one source that the other source does not report on. By the way, the company likes to think to think of themselves as “news analyzer” and not a news aggregator. We think both phrases can work together Whatever you call Newsy there is plenty of value here.

Newsy can be useful in many situations. One potential use is helping to teach critical information skills by reviewing what is and is not reported on in a news story and how it’s reported. For example, how much time does each source give to the story.

But wait, there’s more. In addition to aggregating news reports on the same story, Newsy produces their OWN original video content summarizing the material from each source into a single report. For those who don’t want to view each source video one at a time, here’s a way to learn what each one is reporting in just a minute or two.

You can keyword search Newsy (you’re searching metadata) or browse by one of seven categories:

+ World
+ Economy
+ U.S.
+ Politics
+ Tech/Sci
+ Environment
+ Culture

You can also sort results by:

+ Most Popular
+ Most Recent
+ Most Commented
+ Highest Rated
+ Editor’s Picks

Let’s review how Newsy works:

1] Find a story, search or browse
We searched for “Obama” and got back 10 results.

2] Select the story; We chose “Obama Gives Donors Access to White House” from October 29, 2009 with a video summary that runs about three minutes.

3] After clicking the play we were taken to this page.

5] Immediately, Newsy’s own video summary begins playing.

6] Above the video box (which can be embedded on any web page) notice the direct links to the various news sources used in the summary.

7] In this case the sources are:

+ Fox News
+ The Hill (Text-Based)
+ CNN
+ The Washington Times
+ CBS
+ The Washington Post

A good and well-balanced selection of sources. If you click on any of them, a new window opens and the “source” video (or text) begins playing. Text sources link directly to the article. No more going all over the web to find the content.

Quick Hits

+ Newsy does not offer its services for every news story. That’s minor when you sit back and review what we think is real value in what they offer. Hopefully, they’ll be able to cover more in the future.

+ An iPhone version of Newsy is also available. It’s a free app. Here’s a link to get Newsy iPhone (via the iTunes App Store).

+ If you register for the site you can comment on any story.

+ A text transcript of each Newsy original summary is available. You’ll find it below the summary video box.

+ You can share reports using direct links to many social networks or e-mail a link to the selected story.

+ An RSS feed of stories is available as well as the Newsy blog.1

We hope that Newsy continues to offer a wide variety sources and a well-balanced set of sources for each story it covers. One thing we would love to see is a source list (we’re guessing the Newsy uses more sources than listed on this page) and perhaps the expansion of this page about how news stories are selected. Another page about the news source selection process would be useful. Finally, we would be very happy if you could view stories by source. In other words, show me all of the stories that use video from MSNBC, BBC, CBS, etc.

You can learn more about the company this STLToday article. For example, they are based in Columbia, MO and have a staff (as of a few weeks ago) of 19.

Many Thanks to Charles Knight over at AltSearchEngines for letting us know about Newsy.
Yesterday, Charles ran a post about Newsy focusing on the success of their iPhone app.

The previously rumored Google news site “Flipper” is in fact launching today as “Fast Flip” in Google Labs. But maybe it should be called Google Skimmer because it permits people to move very quickly through lots of visually rich news pages from dozens of partner publications. According to the Google Blog Post:

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

Much More in Greg Sterling’s Search Engine Land Post (with screen shots) where he points out that iPhone and Android versions are available.

Access Fast Flip (Beta) from Google Labs

Source: Search Engine Land

See Also: It’s worth noting that New York Times has offered an “Article Skimmer” prototype since early 2009 when it was described in this article.

Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table while eating brunch. For many of our customers, this ritual is fundamental to their enjoyment of the weekend, and its absence would be jolting.

[Snip]

Instead, our focus was on the fundamentals of the experience. It is empowering to spread so much information out on a table, so we spread as many stories as we can fit into the space of your screen. It is easier and more relaxing to scan a surface of information than flip through a stack, so information is laid out in a rigid two-dimensional grid. The sections do not flip into place; instead, they slide up and down. If you want to imagine the whole of the content as a giant uncut scroll of paper, don’t let us stop you.

In June, 2009 “Article Skimmer” had its third release. You can read about it here.

The third release prototype has (according to the paper):
+ Improved Navigation
+ Arrow Keys: Even More Useful (Many users have expressed delight at being able to move around the article skimmer using the up and down arrow keys. Now you can move between pages using the left and right arrow keys.
+ The Addition of the Times Wire

* On the newspaper archive advanced search page Google lists NewsBank as a newspaper source. It’s not. NewsBank is an aggregator of newspapers.

Looking for More Digitized Newspapers?

Check out the Chronicling America Project from the Library of Congress. They just digitized their one millionth page. Free.

Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program
4.3 million articles (1.95 million scanned pages) are now available and full-text searchable. Some of the material is accessible via Google’s Newspaper Digitization program.

New Zealand: Papers Past
Over 1.3 million digitized newspaper pages. Free.

NewspaperARCHIVE.com
Fee-based (monthly or yearly subscription) from Heritage Microfilm. According to their documentation NA is adding about 2.5 million pages per month. Recently, they added the Stars and Stripes newspaper from 1948-1999.

UK: The Times of London (1785-1985)
Fee-Based.

British Newspapers 1800-1900
2 million pages. Fee-based.

Many libraries (of all types) provide FREE remote (access from home, office) access to digitized newspapers. Just ask your librarian.

USA Today has launched a site called Newsdeck (http://digbig.com/5babef) which aggregates the paper’s top stories in a headline format. The page bears little resemblance to a news site and in fact looks very much like a deck of cards. Each of the eight cards contains headlines on different topics, such as news, travel, money, sport and technology, with each headline linking through to the full story on the paper’s main website.

Direct to NewsDeck from USA Today

The article also mentions the “Skimmer” prototype from the NY Times. We first blogged about Skimmer in March and then again in June.

Source: VIP LiveWire

First, Bing is now including Twitter results from “more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres” for certain types of searches. Learn more via the Bing blog and Search Engine Land.

Second, word from Google Book Search that they’ve added tag clouds for some titles in their database.

From a Blog Post:

Starting today, you’ll find a cloud of “Common Terms and Phrases” on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

Here’s an example.

See Also: Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” program continues to provide a concordance/tag clouds for some titles. They’re found under the heading “concordance” on a book overview page. Here’s an example.

UPDATE: Want More Web Search News? We’ve got it!
++ Google Blog and News Search has added several new features (via Search Engine Roundtable.

++ Google Blog Search Sees Twitter Trends & Raises With Blog Search ‘Hot Queries’ (via Search Engine Land)

++ Bing gets a favorable review from USA Today.

See Also: On a related note, if you’re a Firefox user you can now create tag clouds from Twitter, Google, and Yahoo results via a tool named Search Cloudlet.

From a Blog Post:

Google’s “experiment” in using Wikipedia as a news source on Google News is over, at least in the U.S. and Canada. The experiment was obviously a success, because Google has confirmed for us that the idea has been expanded.

Source: SEL

See Also: Google News Hyperlinks Author Names (via SEL)

The First Look Blog has more about “what’s new” with this update.

Direct to Skimmer

It’s also worth mentioning that the NY Times launched a new service about a month ago named Times Wire. The page automatically updates itself in real-time as new stories are published. You can even personalize the types of articles that appear on your web page. Cool!

Direct to Times Wire

…MetaCarta, a leading geoweb company, and Moreover have partnered on providing the news links for MetaCarta’s news maps. Give it a spin and find out what’s going on in your bit of the globe, http://geosearch.metacarta.com. Zoom in and click search again to update the results and see more local stories…

Direct to MetaCarta News Maps Powered by Moreover

Source: Moreover

Direct to Post.

Source: VIP LiveWire

“Global access to multiple perspectives helps you tell what the real story is,” says Newsy president and co-founder, Jim Spencer, of the basic premise behind his brainchild. He says the idea for the website came to him after observing the way people watch television and use the internet. When people are looking for coverage of big news stories, they channel surf from CNN to MSNBC to FOX, and maybe even to the BBC. They do the same thing on the internet; only on the web, there are thousands-if not millions-of sites to choose from rather than a handful of television networks.

A team of editors monitors news from online, print, and televised sources from around the globe. They then put together 2-3-minute video clips summing up the different kinds of coverage a particular topic is getting in the media. A recent video about the handshake heard around the world between President Obama and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez incorporated video of a debate on FOX News, as well as stories from South American newspapers and websites. The newscasters, of sorts, in the Newsy videos keep commentary to a minimum. “We simply try to point out the differences in the reporting,” says Spencer.

Direct to Newsy.com

Source: Information Today

From the News.com Article

…The Wall Street Journal just took the wraps off an eponymous iPhone app, offering news, video, and even podcasts. Better still, there’s no charge for the app–or the content.

That may surprise Journal subscribers who pay a little more than $100 per year for unrestricted Web access. But it puts the app on an even footing with The New York Times and USA Today apps, among others, which also provide news at no charge.

Direct to App via iTunes Store

See Also: Hulu iPhone App Coming Soon

Would you want to see which stories we [BBC] are publishing, in chronological order, as soon as they are published, but without any prioritisation of the most urgent or important?

Direct to BBC News Radar

Source: BBC News Editors Blog
Hat Tip: Library Stuff

See Also: NewsNow.co.uk (News by topic as it hits the database)

We’ve enabled a new feature called Apture on select New York Times blogs: Dot Earth, Economix and Diner’s Journal. Apture allows readers to dig deeper into a subject without ever leaving the page. In a blog post like this, when you see a hyperlink with a small icon next to it, click on that link. You’ll instantly see related videos, maps, documents, photos, New York Times topic pages and other content, all while staying on the same page.

Have feedback? An email address is listed in the post.

Source: NY Times First Look Blog

Direct to Video

Source: Newssift Blog

+ Create Custom Driving Directions With Google Maps Maker (via SEL)

+ 9 Twitter Search Apps : Better Than Twitter & Google (via SEJ)

+ ATLASerials (ATLAS) Includes Eleven New Titles in ATLASerials (ATLAS) Online Collection of Major Religion and Theology Journals