Vik Singh, a team member of Yahoo’s BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service – it is Yahoo‘s open source search service platform), has launched a new type of a search engine specially designed for searching news. BOSS’ goal was to bring in a new change and innovation in the search industry. But as an advancement to BOSS, TweetNews has gone beyond that. This new search engine matches news from Yahoo News with hot topics that are discussed at Twitter. As a result, more relevant and most up-to-date news are pulled and displayed for users. This search engine working well and are much better than news aggregators that are used in Google News or the usual Yahoo News. Singh has explained in his blog spot that Yahoo’s News aggregator sorts or displays news based on the time it was posted. It actually stacks the news on time basis and displays the news posted last as the latest news. He says that he has created this search engine to overcome this issue, as the way it is sorted now would not help people as any old news can be updated at any time.
Some news site has also introduced some new search strategies using which relevant news are pulled from various locations and published. Even this would not be of great help as this search mechanism could even pull out stale news just because it has more number of articles written on the topic or something with more keywords matching with each other. Now, Vik Singh’s new TweetNews tries to match latest updates from Twitter tweets and relevant news from Yahoo News and displays a combination of these two. The new news site at the moment has nothing attractive in its home page. Singh has specified that he likes to have an impressive home page with the hottest news on it. This site is certainly going to be a good platform for highlighting both Twitter and BOSS.
The most interesting thing about TweetNews’ creation is that Singh had to write one 100 lines of code to build this marvelous creation and its open source. Yet another interesting thing is that TweetNews being a ranking signal to check and confirm the freshness of news can become more popular and hit the market with a bang. This can be really useful a tool if created properly. This area certainly requires more exploration. All this has been possible only because of Yahoo BOSS, BOSS Mashup framework and Twitter‘s API,
In short, TwitterNews is a tool that would assure freshness of any news that is published. It also combines the authoritative news that is published in combination with the readers’ comments, views and updates that is relevant to the news. The codes are now available as open sources and can be downloaded online. It is completely free of cost.