Indexing a News Syndication Services

Not U$enet or the like...

[Tigrou]

I am planning on producing a month report for clients and I want to be able to tell my clients how many times, and where, their company and product names have shown up in "the news". Actually, it is not as simple as that since the data would be manipulated/formatted based on a variety of factors. So realistically, I'd need to download this information, index it, and then query/present it.

I don't need a hyperexpensive news service. Probably just downloading the headlines and summaries of stories of 10 big international / European dailies once per month would be fine. This could be cheap/free feeds from 10 different news sites or even be 1 "teaser" service where clients have to pay for the full stories.

What do you suggest?

The clients are generally in the area of environment protection/energy in Europe if that helps.

Thanks,
Colin
ps And yes, I am aware of such services such as:
www.wis--ye.com (replace blanks with "ee")
but that doesn't exactly suit my needs as it can't easily be downloaded.

[rogerd]

I wonder if searching/scraping Google News might be a viable solution for this. It would certainly turn up many more instances of coverage than focusing on a handful of major newspapers.

[your_store]

Well, there was a feature at Yahoo! News that let you create personalized RSS feeds. For instance, enter Google and your feed would only have news that mentiond Google. However, for the life of me I can't find the feature anymore.

If you decide to go the route of following only a number of majors, I would suggest using their RSS feeds. You could easily import all the feeds into a database and query to your heart's content.

[Tigrou]

Roger and Your_store, thanks for your input. Good tips.