It’s pretty cool. The sad thing is that I was unable to find myself in any recent news. Of course, given that it appears I was murdered in the late 19th century (according to the Olean Democrat on Tuesday, May 2, 1893,) this is hardly surprising.
Moved and carried that the attorney be instructed to look after the interests of ths city as pertains to the inquest about be held to inquire into the cause of death of Joseph Dolson in the sewer ditch on Laurens street April 28th, 1893.
Yuck! In the sewer ditch? Not too happy about that.
But, my death aside, the whole service is really pretty neat. You can view results in a timeline format, defaulting to sort from oldest to newest. If you’re trying to research, for example, the first mention of a particular technology or first use of a phrase, this could be a fantastic way to delve into the records. If you want to see an overview of a topic and how it was treated differently over time, this is a great resource.
It’s not perfect yet. The biggest hole, which is applicable to any news archive query, is completeness. Although the search is performed across a wide range of historical archives, it’s still missing a lot of information. This is undoubtedly a licensing issue – despite the fact that Google is providing easy access to purchasable content (not giving it away for free; an important distinction), I’m sure many companies see this service as a challenge to their control of information.
That is undoubtedly the reason I didn’t find myself in any recent archives. I know that I appeared in the newspaper in Missoula, Montana, where I grew up, in the 1990′s. No references, however, were in the results to be found. It would appear that my home town paper is not indexed.
This isn’t exactly a surprise. Small Montana papers are hardly one of the first sources Google would be likely to get involved, and, similarly, are a source which it’s unlikely that many of the major newspaper archive indexes they’re searching would have necessarily contracted with. Nonetheless, this leaves a big hole in the archives for small-town history. Local search is left in the lurch, for now.
Of course, your paper might very well be included – there’s no list of sources available, so it’s a bit of a crap shoot.
There are, perhaps, some duplicate content issues to be worked out. The results for this search are a little bit strange. Since these results could well change, I’m providing a screen capture as well so I can point out the fact that the 10 results on this page are all exactly the same.
Thanks to Phillip Lenssen and Barry Schwartz.
The beta version of a fairly substantial new competitor in the search realm, Kosmix, has recently expanded their vertical search categories to offer search in Video Games and Finance, in addition to the Health, Travel, and Politics verticals they’d launched back in February.
Tied to their Video Games vertical is a newly launched search engine, Gazerk. Besides the fact that the domain name demonstrates very clearly how the world seems to be running out of real word domains, this powered-by-Kosmix search engine should be appealing to the video game geek world. The color palette used by Gazerk is awful, by the way – pink text on a black background is definitely not a design with me in mind.
The US Politics vertical, which I hadn’t seen before, is quite useful – Kosmix’ categorization technology gives you the ability to organize the search results according to viewpoint – currently only Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian, so it’s only a very general breakdown, but the idea may have potential.
Hat tip to Nadir at SEO Principle for noticing the new vertical search engines.
From Top Tech News, Jay Wrolstad reports that Digg.com will incorporate current events in their social news network. The new version of the site will be launching on June 26th, and will apply the traditional "Digg" ranking to new categories including general news and video clips.
The article also reports that Digg will be increasing their social-networking aspects, adding the ability to pick and share your category preferences with friends or add personalized input to what appears on the pages. Although, from the description, I must admit I’m not really clear what "add their input to what appears on the Web pages" may mean.
This is, of course, rather interesting when you consider that AOL’s recent launch of Netscape.com as a user-rated news source includes a number of these additional options.
It’ll be interesting to see what impact these new options may have on Digg. First of all, the front page itself may change significantly. There’s only so much room on the very first page of a site; and the percentage of tech news is likely to decrease. Despite the fact that Digg’s audience is currently almost exclusively people involved with or interested in the technology industry, this may very quickly expand to include others with interests solely in comical videos or in celebrity news. To me, this would be a serious diminishment in the value and interest I’ve received from Digg.
But, maybe this won’t happen – it’s also quite possible that Digg’s new push will fail to escape from the tech crowd, and the new categories will tend to populated with geek favorites such as Star Trek clips.
My personal feeling is that the expansion into current events and other news categories is great – although it reduces the overall focus of the site, these are interesting and potentially fruitful ways of retrieving information you may not otherwise see. However, I think that the incorporation of video may be a mistake. This detracts from the otherwise (mostly) serious information and articles available on Digg, supplanting it with popular media and pointless video clips. These have their place; but I feel that the inclusion of video is likely to seriously diffuse the newsworthy content available on Digg.
