"Hi all. We do not yet have access to Lexis/Nexis, DIALOG, etc. in our library yet but plan on (I am pushing for it) getting at least one of them soon. In the interim, however, I'd like to have some access to newspaper articles online (preferably free). I'm trying to avoid having to go to individual newspaper archives to search. General searches on search engines bring back some good results but often have to weed through a lot of junk. Any suggestions from others out there who are in the same situation? Thanks."
Could you have written this message? Do you wish there was a way to get at the archives of newspapers or search their Web sites for articles easily? To help you accomplish that very thing, this column profiles Web sites with news search services or listings of news archives that enable to cast that net out to the 'Net and snag news stories only.
Small Hours / News Archives www.aa.net/-rclarklarchives.html
Rod Clarke, the creator of the list, includes weekly and monthly newspapers and the archives of news agencies and newsletters from organizations such as Amnesty International or U.N. Daily Highlights, and even some television station sites.
List Organization: Organized by regions of the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, Mideast Africa, South Asia, Asia, Oceania, Central and South America. The links take you to the homepage of the newspaper or to the search page for the archive.
News Hunt www.newshunt.com
List Contents: News Hunt is a hybrid-part "scout page," part search engine facilitator. It gives you a listing of news publications with free searchable archives. Click on one of the 66 listings and you get a screen with a search box into which you can type your request.
List Organization: News Hunt is organized by categories of news needs: general archives arts & entertainment papers, breaking news business, popular, technology, and weather. Another section - newspapers by state provides a listing of all the publications with archives in each state, creating a very useful compendium of both mainstream daily publications and niche and university publications.
Special Libraries Association/News Division Newspaper Archives on the Web sunsite.unc.edu/slanews/internet/archives.html
This classic "scout page" was the brainchild of Margot Williams, metro desk researcher at the Washington Post. She was teaching an Internet course at George Washington University and turned her students on to the task of locating daily newspapers with available archives. The resultant list was augmented with additional links.
List organization: This long chart, expanding to include non-U.S. archives, includes links to the news sites' homepages, specific links to the archives within the site, database start-up date, and the cost of searching the site.
News Index www.newsindex.com
"The most comprehensive, up to the minute News Search Engine on the planet." Begun in April 1996 by the entrepreneurial Sean Peck, this innovative service attempts to cull current articles from news sites from around the world.
Site contents: Including the major news sites and Reuters, it is an index of current articles only, not an archive. In fact, the service supposedly re-indexes the target sites every 1-2 hours. As such, it is a good way to get a cross section of contemporary coverage but it is not a good way to research old stories.
Other features: The custom search service delivers to your e-mail box articles fitting the profile you've selected. You can create up to five profile searches.
News Works www.newsworks.com
A nice service from the ill-fated New Century Network will be around, but use it until it dies a lamentable death. The feature most useful to journalists and others seeking content from a variety of news sources was the Search Service, which indexed and searched the contents of about 120 newspaper Web sites using Infoseek's (www.infoseek.com) spider technology.
Total News www.totalnews.com
Soon after its launch, Total News got itself into hot water with news site publishers, who objected to the frames because they made the retrieved stories stay within the Total News frame. It looked, the publishers said, as if it were a Total News story.
According to a New York Law Review story in June, 1997, the media companies brought a litany of claims, alleging that the defendants' practice of framing constituted misappropriation, trademark dilution, trademark infringement, copyright infringement, false designations of origin, false representations and false advertising, unfair competition, deceptive acts and practices and tortious interference with contractual relations." Total News lost the lawsuit. This is actually an advantage to the searcher. Unlike News Works' search, which keeps the results screen within its page and makes it difficult to determine which site you are on, the whole page from the news site remains when using Total News.
Site contents: Total News' search robot scans about 1,200 news sites and updates the database three or four times a day.
Searching: The system uses a Web crawler called Paradigm News Search. Be sure to read the search help files-you'll see some interesting things, including the fact that one or two letter (or numeral) words are ignored in the search. (So forget using Total News to find reviews about the band U2's recent tour!)
NewsBot www.newsbot.com www.wired.com/newbot/
Using HotBot's search engine, this site is all about time. The search box lets you put in a search term and then select how current you want the items retrieved to be: 6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, 4 days, 7 days, whenever. You can also select certain types of news you want retrieved: all news, business, politics, entertainment, health, sports, technology, world. Each of the retrieved items has a date and time stamp on it in red to help the searcher select the most recent postings. The display of results is crisp and clean. The bad news, though, is there is no clear listing of what sites are searched or how often. More bad news is the fact that the database is not purged of links to URLs no longer containing the news story. This is a big problem with Web-published news search databases. NewsBot, like its big brother HotBot, does provide some of the most innovative ways to focus searches through its search option boxes.
News Tracker nt.excite.com
Excite's news-only search service grants a number of ways to quickly scan coverage of particular events or specific features from a variety of news sources. Do a search and then have the results sorted by relevancy, with the lead of the story displayed. Select "Show Titles Only" for a listing of relevancy-ordered articles with only the headline and publication name displayed.
Click on "View by Publication" to see results grouped by publication and then sorted by relevancy. Or click on "View by Date" to get the results grouped chronologically first and then by relevancy.
YAHOO headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage
Get a quick list of top news stories and how they are covered by papers around the world. Click on one of the top stories they are following and you'll get a grouping of news stories by news, magazines & features, related Web sites, live coverage, or multimedia coverage. This is another of the clean, organized, reliable resources put together for 'Net citizens by the good people at Yahoo. Thank you, Yahoo. But there is a bit of bad news, too. When you use the "Search" box to find stories in the news area of Yahoo, you get a listing of stories but no indication of where they come from.
Nora Paul can be reached by e-mail at npaul@poynter.org