There is a new news search engine and news portal in town.

ez2News.com is a new search engine for news headlines and articles. The domain name is registered to Holomedia in Montgiscard in France, so we guess it is French. Moreover, some of the error messages sound a bit French (”Links are not founded”).

16 national sites

It’s International roots are underlined by the lines of flags at the very top of the home page. There are separate sub-sites for Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, India, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, the UK, the US, China and Japan.

Each and every one of these sub-sites serve updated news headlines of particular relevance to that country, and in the local language.

Too much focus on a limited number of sources

ez2news claims it is spidering some 12,500 news sites for headlines, and we believe them.

That being said, some of the default news headlines selections are a bit one-sided. At the moment of writing all UK section headlines is from BBC, admittedly a very reliable news source, but the Brits have some other good alternatives.

(By the way, ez2News, you have to do something with the news source logo. Many of them are unreadable due to incorrect image HTML coding).

News categories

The left hand column includes some 15 sub-categories, which again brings up a new list of relevant headlines, including topics like business, education, finance and sports.

Again the UK version seems to rely solely on BBC at the moment. The international version, however, brings up headlines from more news sources.

Dominated by Google News

What worries us, though, is that most of these headlines and pictures are fetched from Google News and Yahoo! News, including their related links and URLs. This makes us wonder what the value added is supposed to be.

By doing it this way, ez2News does not have to make the selection themselves — automatically, like Google, or by hand, like Yahoo! — but this method makes it more like a “meta portal” than a new news portal in its own right.

It is possible to submit RSS feeds and links, though, which may lead to a broader selection of front page headlines in the future.

Moreover, the search engine does bring up alternative new sources. These are so “alternative”, in fact, that they can be in any language, even when you use the English default version. We find no way of focusing the search to one particular language.

So our verdict is the following:

This is a promising new news site. The design is easy to read, and navigation is swift.

The limited search capabilities, though, and the focus on only one or two sources for default headlines, lead us to believe that the site has been launched too soon. We’ll come back when it is really out of beta.

For a list of alternative new search engines and portals, see the Pandia Newsfinder.