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Effective Internet Search: Excerpts

News Document Search Interfaces (from Reference Manual)

Note: Internal book hyperlinks, except those internal to this page, have been deactivated below.

People often use the terms "Internet" and "Web" interchangeably, when in fact, the Web makes up only a small fraction of the entire Internet — albeit one of the most popular.

In fact, to search engines, the second most important Internet application after the Web is news. All search engines featured in this book have a specialized news document search interface, except for Copernic and MSN Search. But the latter does report news clips on its findings pages.

News search interfaces work a bit differently for each search engine. Copernic is the most individual, since it treats news as a search engine category, involving a set of source search engines specialized in the news Internet application.
 

AlltheWeb

Click on the "News" tab while in any of the search entry screens. This branches you to another screen for news. In the advanced news search screen, in addition to a text box for search terms, you will find various boxes to select or enter:

• Location in the article text: in the headline, URL, or anywhere in the article.
• Language: including encoding method.
• Topic category: Business, Finance, Technology, Sports, Traffic, Weather, Entertainment.
• Major geographical region: International, United States, local. Reference Section 6.2: Geographical region of server.
• Internet domain of the news source: can be used to include or exclude particular sources.

Enter cnn.com for news from CNN. Then use the domain suffix to specify the country as being the United Kingdom, i.e., domain suffix uk. Reference Section: 6.2: URL (resource) or site Internet address.

• Specific geographical location: e.g., France, Colorado, San Diego.
• News source (creator): e.g., CNN, New York Times.
• News document age: selected from a drop-down menu, using increments ranging from the last 2 hours to the last week, to "All pages" still in the news catalog. Reference Section 6.2: File age.
• Whether to sort findings by relevance or by date: Reference Section 6.3: Overall ordering.

AltaVista

Click on the "News" tab to go to the news search entry interface.
 

There, in addition to a text box for search terms, you will find various drop-down menu boxes to select:

• Topic category: Top Stories, Business, Finance, and so on.
• Major geographical region: Africa, Europe, United Kingdom, and so on. Reference Section 6.2: Geographical region of server.
• News document age: selected from a drop-down menu, in increments ranging from "Today/Yesterday" to "Any time." You can also choose a specific range of dates option in the drop-down menu. Reference Section 6.2: File age.

Click on the "News" tab, choose "All Topics" in the drop-down menu, and type Bell Centre as a phrase in the text box.

You can also select news topic categories and particular news stories from hyperlinks given at two levels on the screen below the above boxes. The first level of choices for AltaVista Canada appears below:
 

Copernic

For the details on Copernic's categories, see Search Tool Guide: Search Tool Guide Control Center.

Has a news search engine group that has the following categories of news search engines:

• By country: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Portugal, UK.
• By language: French, German, Italian, Spanish.
• By topic: business, technology, sports.
• By topic and country: sports in France, technology in France.
• By topic and language: technology news in French.
• By newspaper and country: newspapers (U.S.), newspapers in France.

Some of the above mix search engine by Internet application with some other method of establishing search engine specialization, namely, topic, language, and country.

In addition, Copernic provides a category called "Top News," which invokes the major Internet news search engines, such as those of AltaVista, Google, FAST (now owned by Yahoo), Yahoo, MSN, ABC, and so on.

Google

Provides a separate "news" link on its simple search interfaces. Click on it to go to a news screen.

That screen will be full of headlines. For stories not already on the page, you can:

• Enter search terms in the text box provided. Apply the search term against the news catalog, or more generally, against a wider set of catalogs. Do this by using either the "Search News" or the "Search the Web" buttons to start the search.

Search for Bell Centre as a phrase, and then press "Search News."

 

Google news search entry uses a combination method, searching by both keyword and subject category.

• Choose links to branch to various sections of the news interface page for stories:
  • From various topic categories, namely, Business, Sci/tech, Sports, Entertainment, and Health.
  • From the single "Top stories" category.
  • From news sources all over the world or just from the U.S.

In news search, only certain field operators work : For intitle: and intext: field operators: Reference Section 6.2: URL (resource) or site Internet address. For inurl: and site: field operators: Reference Section 6.2: Document file section or location.

The fields on Google advanced news search entry interface are shown below.
 

Find results with all of the words Sort by relevance Sort by date with the exact phrase with at least one of the words without the words News source Return only articles from the  news source named   e.g. CNN, New York Times Location Return only articles from news  sources located in   A country or a U.S. state Occurrences Return results where my  terms occur anywhere in the article in the headline of the article in the body of the article in the URL of the article Date Return articles published   anytime last hour last day past week past month   Return articles published between   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Oct Sep and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Oct Sep

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