RocketNews is among the best independent news search services, along with NewsNow and Topix.net. Now they index sound and video in addition to news and blogs.

By Lars Våge, Internetbrus

RocketNews has an index of dome 16 000 news web sites and 70 000 RSS feeds and also blogs. They offer a small number of ready-made RSS feeds, and you can save your own feeds based on search terms.

You will not find any stories in their index older than a couple of days – they present only current news and nothing else.

NewsNow searches more than 22 000 sources in 15 languages. However you can only use a single search word if you are not a paying customer. They do not offer RSS feeds.

Topix.net searches some 10 000 sources, though only in English. Topix.net differ from similar services in that they categorize the news stories in thousands of categories. They offer ready-made RSS feeds and you can also make your own feed based on any search.

Both NewsNow and Topix.net include blogs among their sources.

Now you can search RocketNews for news-related sound and video at RocketNews. The videos are found through the feeds of larger media companies while much of the sound material is found in podcasts.

It is my distinct impression that the indexing of these media files is done mostly on the basis of the text surrounding the link to a media file. If RocketNews had been using any kind of automatic speech recognition and transcription, this would have been evident in the user interface. And if they did have their own automatic speech recognition solution, they would certainly have

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.

Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine

Datormagazin. He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org.

Lars and Lars are co-authors of a book on Internet research: Informationssökning på Internet.