By Pandia guest writer Lars Våge

Last summer I wrote an article on the interesting French news search service Wikio. Now Wikio has launched a version for English language sources, which should make it even more interesting for our readers.

The site is very much based on a Web 2.0 philosophy. The interface is easy to use and very similar to the excellent RSS-reader Netvibes. This should come as no surprise, as both Wikio and Netvibes are products made by the same developers.

As I wrote in June, there is much that makes Wkio interesting:

• Wikio is indexing not only professional news media, but also blogs
• Users may influence search engine ratings by voting on search listings
• You can add comments to listings
• You may add your own personalized news pages
• You may even write your own news articles and Wikio will index them
• Articles and blog posts are automatically given category tags
• RSS-feeds are available for both tags and search expressions.

Now there are also Wikio for German, Spanish and Italian sources. Those who know these languages will find a lot of very useful information.

It seems to me that the English language Wikio is as good as — or even better — than the news search services of Google and Yahoo! What’s just as important: It is more fun!

Having used the French language RSS feeds for some six months now, I can confirm that they work well.

See also Wikio’s page for search engine news headlines.

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.