The Financial Times New Search Engine

[Steve Bennett]

The Financial Times Group of the UK has launched a new search engine called Newssift. The search engine does a good job by suggesting useful ways of filtering your search results. With the arrival of Microsoft's Bing, suddenly my free news search options have expanded beyond my old favourite Google News. Once you enter your search terms, Newssift presents you with pick lists of filters in the following categories: Business Topic Organization Place Person Theme It works surprisingly well for my news searches. Each of these major categories can also be further filtered by clicking any of the More Options buttons. I found it very easy to rapidly reduce the number of hits my searches return by using these options. Newssift further enriches your search results with a number of nice analytic touches. These include sentiment analysis and a breakdown of source categories, and the top 7 organisations, places, people and themes. As you can see from the pictures, all of these results are presented visually and another nice touch is the extra information revealed when you mouse over each category. A minor question is why the top 7 in each area? Newssift can do all of this because of its focus on news, and only news. Sources used appear to meet my expectations as they cover: Online News Newspapers Magazines Newswires Research Blogs News Portals Television & Radio This is all very impressive and I have put Newssift on my toolbar - but if you think you are getting free access to the Financial Times newspaper - think again. While matching FT articles are included in the search results and analysis I've talked about above, clicking on the FT article summary takes you to their normal (primarily paid) registration offers. The 'cherry on the cake' is that at the end of my filtering, the matching news articles to my searches are both right on topic and more numerous than in both Bing and Google. And that's just they way I want it. Thanks FT!

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