I see a lot of new search products on a daily basis. One of the things I don’t see often, though, is real improvements to the presentation of search result. Jamesoo is a news search engine with an innovative results page: The news stories that match your query are presented in newspaper layout.

Jamesoo was launched this month. It searches RSS feeds, which should make for fresh news and a brand new, relevant “newspaper” on the subject of your choice, whenever you want it. A great idea.

But how does it work and is it any good?

How does it work?

When you do a search on Jamesoo, a “newspaper” is compiled for you: You can page through news from the last seven days with headlines, teasers and images much like a regular news paper. The pages are easy to scan and the design is relatively uncluttered.

Clicking the headline brings you to the entire story on its original page. Another link below the story leads to a Jamesoo page with recent stories from the same source.

Jamesoo is available in several languages. The interface is translated into Arabian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. These localized versions search for news in the language in question, e.g. a search on the Swedish page brings news stories in Swedish only.

Is it any good?

Jamesoo has an algorithm which classifies the sources by relevance. With the appalling signal to noise ratio in the blogosphere, this is not an easy job and it seems Jamesoo has a job to do.

Two of my test searches (Johan McCain and Barack Obama) contained no irrelevant stories, but still some of the results were void of real news value.

Here’s an example:

Searching for news on Barack Obama, one of the top stories in my Jamesoo “newspaper” had the headline Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle. The entire story consists of an image with the text “Barack Obama has left a comment in your blog” and a blurb: “Looks like a new meme is finding it’s way around the Internet. It now seems as though Barack will soon have to battle Chuck Norris for WWW domination.” This silly newsflash didn’t make it onto the top 10 pages of a similar search on Google News.

The quality of the stores is my main concern. There is also the issue of speed: During my test, the response time was several seconds, which won’t do in 2008.

Another issue is the lack of RSS. There is no way to subscribe to your search results. Of course, the mail boon of Jamesoo is the way the results are presented. Still, if the quality of the search results improved, people would like to add them to their RSS reader.

The design could be better. The home page looks good, the results pages are a little gaudy. This can be easily fixed, though.

Still, Jamesoo is fun to use and the way the results are presented is innovative and interesting.

I believe the big search engines could learn much from startups. Google News gives you lots of options, bells and whistles, but if all you want is fresh news on the topic of your choice, Jamesoo’s concept is a winner.

Jamesoo was launched just weeks ago. Once they iron out some kinks, this could be a great product.