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RocketNews.com offers a free, realtime news search engine. The site "continuously searches every link on thousands of sources - major online news sources, national newspapers, city newspapers, newswires, magazines, trade publications and corporate press releases" the company claims on its web site. Users can search for news articles by keyword back only five days. The "0" days option returns stories from just the current day.

 

A recent search for stories about "anthrax" (selecting the "0" days option) returned 128 stories all from the current day. The stories, ranked by perceived relevancy, were from sources inlcuding The Boston Herald, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Associated Press and the New York Daily News among many others. All of the results were displayed on one very long page. (By contrast, a search at Altavista, powered by Moreover's news search, for "anthrax" conducted on the same day returned only 57 results from that day, but included some news from sources different than those included in the Rocket News search results).

 

Searchers can use the "Advanced Search" page to conduct searches utilizing boolean logic. The "Advanced Search" page offers three search boxes representing boolean connectors:

• "Must include these words" ("AND")
• "And any of these words" ("OR")
• "And none of these words" ("NOT" or "BUT NOT")

It is not necessary to type the boolean connectors into the advanced search boxes, because each box defaults to the respective connectors (listed above).

 

Just as Google's business plan calls for that site to generate revenue by licensing its search technology to corporate clients in order to continue to offer its search engine free, Rocket News seeks to license its headline/news aggregating technology to web publishers who want to integrate current headline news into their own web site or newsletters or to deliver such content to clients' e-mail boxes. This allows Rocket News to offer the news search engine functions for free (for now at least).

 

For more information on searching archival news see this article regarding NewsLibrary.com.

 

Also see this article regarding using Moreover's news search via AltaVista.