The innovative search engine, Newssift, has just been launched in beta by the Financial Times Group. This is a desperate attempt business users to search. Since it permits users to create definitive and specific queries to return highly relevant results, there is a good chance it will achieve its goal.
Newssift is slanted towards business oriented sources; magazines, blogs, newspapers and other sources with high credibility are preferred to help maintain a higher standard of quality in the results.
The site is monetized by the sale of ad space down the right hand side of the search results; these are not yet contextually driven from searches performed, but this will be part of a future release.
When a user enters a search term, sub categories come up to prompt a narrowing of the search. Clicking on a topic under “business topics”, “organization”, “place”, “person” or “theme” is possible, or the user can just click “Go” and view results from all categories.
Newssift also includes a “Sentiment” pie chart that shows a percentage break down of the results. A search can show how many positive, neutral, and negative stories there are for each factor, and youc an choose to only view ones from a particular group.
There is also an “Article Sources” pie chart, to divide “online news”, “blogs”, “newspapers”, etc. Users can also search within the results, which feature is not as readily available on most major search engines.
There’s more. Selecting a timeframe of results within the search criteria can also be done; results from the current day or any specific past date or date range can be brought up by inputting the appropriate timeframe. This is a search engine to watch – it is fast, easy and extremely focused.
Tags: News, pie charts, vertical search
