March 19 2001.

AltaVista Launches News Search

On March 19th AltaVista launches its brand new news search centre. It is powered by technology from the Web intelligence company Moreover. The centre has been up and running for a couple of days, and this is what you find: An uncluttered, informative page sporting powerful search capabilities in a simple search field. You also get a view of the latest top stories from around the world and the opportunity to look for news by category.

Moreover provides a database of time-sensitive news headlines drawn from thousands of online news sources. The searcher will be able to find relevant news within 15 minutes of its first appearance online.

The news search will also be integrated in AltaVista's Web search, so if you do a search on altavista.com, you will be presented with the most current news headlines on the topic along with the results from AltaVista's database.

Although the new news search centre is simple and uncluttered, it is powerful. It supports both search engine math and true Boolean searching. So it is easy to find what you want either you are a pro or a "newbie".

There is only one thing we miss: When the search results are presented, all you get is the headline and the source. If the headline is not a good representation of the article that follows, there is no way of knowing if this is what you are looking for. It would be helpful to get to see the first lines of the article as well. This is unfortunately not a feature provided by Moreover.

For more news resources, go to The Pandia Newsfinder.

AltaVista news search centre

Moreover

AltaVista's Web search

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