steveb - 9:16 am on Oct 5, 2002 (gmt 0)

Google Guy... my experience makes me a very good lab rat about Google news. I do a lot of news searching to add a couple links to articles on a widget news page of my own. Google news is one of the thirty or so places I go each day.

Google News is quite good on speed. Articles are listed promptly. I search by date as opposed to relevance firstly because I search every day so I only care about the newest items, but also because "relevance" is not that good. Minimally I'd make "sort by date" the default.

A minor problem I've thought about is in my area there are two crap sites that dominate the results. I don't know how they do it, but they always get fairly current results with articles posted for some time already. I've set my search to ignore these two sites, but they somehow have exploited a weakness in the news search to always appear fresh.

Semi-humorous note, I've bookedmarked a news search withthese two sites on -ignore... a friend emails that he did a Google news search and found one of MY articles on one of the sites... so I remove the -ignore and do asearch, and Google News finds TWENTY of my articles they plagiarized! (I did report this to the news/abuse email address.)

Anyway, News does NOT pick up all the articles on my topic that I find at other news search sources, BUT I have not found a single site that does better than Google News.