Just followed a Silicon Valley Beat pointer to Snap’s beta news search engine. It isn’t going to put other news search services out of business any time soon but it does have an easy interface (once you realize the space at the top of the search results is to search within, not start over) and a snazzy side window that shows the page being highlighted in the results box. You can click on a link above and view the article on its native page. It also has one of the best domains left for a news search brand — “newsfilter.com.” From the site: “NewsFilter.com brings you all of the latest news and gives you the ability to filter and sort as well. Using our proprietary technology, you can browse, sort, refine and read the news all in one interface.”
The engine is powered by sister Idealab company X1, which just got $10 million in VC funding. The results are powered by Moreover, which boasts of access to “nearly 10,000 Sources, 140,000 Articles a day, 126 countries in 25 languages, 1,200,000 Weblogs, (3,000 of the most influential); OEM customers include MSN, Ask Jeeves and Factiva.
This iteration has a sort of mixed blessing for registration/subscription publishers — results don’t seem to go beyond the amount available before the firewall kicks in. As it happens, I was quoted over the weekend in a Philadelphia Inquirer story that pops up quickly in Google News. My name doesn’t show up on Snap News Search but the headline does; the graphic is a redirect to a Moreover page showing a registration log-in page. Only one paidContent reference in another publication came up compared to nine recent mentions in Yahoo News and twice that in Google News.
Update: Michael Kopp, Moreover director of marketing, reminds me that each Moreover portal partner makes its own decisions about which sources to use, resulting in different results. That means a news search on Snap or any of the others shouldn’t be viewed as a reflection of the depth of sources Moreover can provide. Maybe Snap should choose to go deep.
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