Forum Moderators: phranque
People ask me quite often what news services I follow in order to stay abreast of things in the search engine world. The following is my daily reading. I do hope the search engines take some time one day to figure out what Internet News is about. Until then, they just aren't worth bothering. Search Engine News Trackers
News from one of the world wide leaders in breaking news. AP has been called the source of all daily news. Most big tech news outlets use delayed AP news.
Interface: 4 of 5 (The stories are neatly arranged with titles very easy to read)
Internet news from Reuters. The other big daily news machine. Timely and always up to date with breaking news.
Interface: 4 of 5 (The stories are neatly arranged with titles very easy to read and it's a fast loading page.)
The classic original news scraper. Updated frequently through out the day.
Interface: 4 of 5. Since the move to Tucows, there are so many graphics now that it is slow loading and visually noisy. Story titles are still easy to read.
The search engine category at NewsNow is very good and timely. They don't miss much and have some stories you won't find anywhere else.
Interface: 1 of 5. The interface is quite slow and bloated with javascript. Stories are on meta redirects. Pain to use.
Probably the best kept secret on the net for finding news. Use the advanced interface to search for search engine news stories. The only draw back here is that the same story will be listed dozens upon dozens of times. There is no clustering of the same story, so all the sites that carry AP or Reuters distributed news get a listing (ugh).
Interface: 4 of 5. Micro font problem. It's still easy to use, but over eager css makes it hard to read.
Gary Prices research, data, and search engine news tracker. Features extremely timely articles. Often first with big stories. Updated daily
Interface: 3 of 5. Stories have little or confusing separation with blood red for a link color that over powers the page (sorry Gary). The rest of the page is very clean and noise free.
This link is to Wall Street Research Net company news (Link is to Yahoo news). They have a great stock tracker where you can follow news about public companies. They often have stories covered no where else. It is most business oriented news. They cover about the last month worth of news for each company.
Interface: 4 of 5. The story titles are quite easy to read. There are quite a few graphics and ads in to the top and left, but with the story titles so easy to spot, it can be over looked.
Tech news from internet.com. They take weekends off but have 30-40 hand picked articles a day from traditional tech news outlets. They also have one of the few good archive news systems of any of the scrapers.
Interface: 4 of 5. The story titles are very easy to read with good separation between stories. However, it *is* internet.com and they always have too many ads. It's page spam city with 4 graphic ads and 40 link ads and a couple of boxes. That said, it is still better than it used to be. It makes for a very slow loading page most week days.
A great deal of foreign blog news. I find it is rare to find a good story here. From time-to-time they have something. Use the search feature to cut through the high volume of noise.
Interface: 1 of 5. Yet another site with good content layered under a noisy hard to read and use interface.
A nice blog style search engine news tracker. Everything is nicely categorized.
Interface: 3 of 5. Fast loading, but hard to read colors with light blue links on light blue background.
Aaron Swartz's Google blog. Good timely info updated with new stories a couple times a week.
Interface: 5 of 5. Well separated stories with good titles in a default browser font and no link tricks (nice work).
Good Blog news tracker. They do pull up some rare stuff from time-to-time. There's quite a bit of noise to sift through, but the search feature is pretty good. Do your searches for se news and then bookmark the results pages. Problems: Sponsored Ads are unremarked - it just makes me wonder if the results are paid ads too? They also "cache" pages without prior permission.
Interface: 3 of 5. A fairly traditional se style results pages.
Mostly a repackage of AP and Reuters news. Very slow to update. You'll have to dig through some stuff such as the cbs marketwatch stuff (is that paid advertising?), but it's good for a weekly overview.
Interface: 4 of 5. easy to use and well laid out. Touch too many ads, but you can always find the headlines and go.
Fairly easy to follow story links that are updated daily. Definitely one to watch.
Interface: 4.25 of 5. Fonts are just a smidge small for my taste, but still readable with great use of white space to separate stories (a tidbit overlooked by too many other sites)
The source for all things Linux, pro open source, and anti-Microsoft. They have good obscure tech news that I'm glad someone is talking about. Extremely biased articles on anything noteworthy, but that's the attraction of the site to give a fresh non-main stream opinion on things.
Interface: 1 of 5. It's slashdot. You either love the software or hate it. Difficult and confusing to use. Some stories thread, some don't. It will take days upon weeks of usage to figure it out.
Timely data, news, search, and research stories with brief reviews and comments about articles. It's a nice distillation that helps put some context on the news. (subscribe to 'extra' for the best stuff).
Interface: 4.5 of 5. Very easy to use and follow. Minor complaints: touch of small fonts, links not underlined, and no left border between brown stripe and content - I can live with it.
The best thing about this, is the inclusion of Wired stories. They also have rerolled Reuters and AP like Yahoo.
Interface: 2 of 5. Overblown and slow. Takes for ever to go from page view to page view - don't care for it at all. There's nothing major wrong with it - but did I mention it's slow? Too many graphics and too much code.
Interface: 4 of 5. Very easy to read and well laid out with no nonsense.
Interface: 4 of 5. A bit dated in look and feel, but easy to use and fast.
Interface: 4.5 of 5. Very easy to use and read with user definable skins.
Fall from Grace:
This once promising news scraper has slowly gone down hill over the last year. It's always same sources. Most days it's 2-6 hours behind other services. Since they do take money to list stories, you'll find some eye brow raising links here and there.
Interface: 1 of 5. Over blown javascript in migraine orange in micro font.
Remember when they used to have the most timely and enjoyable to read stories? The stories are not of the caliber they used to be. While in 99-00 I read just about everything there, it's just not worth the time any more.
Since Chris Sherman left for SearchEngineWatch, he's turned out to be a hard (impossible) act to follow. They've yet to find anything close to what he did over there. It's not worth even a passing glance now.
The Crawlers?
Lastly, what about the crawler search engines? They have much work too do. A few of them are out of touch with what people are looking for in internet news. People don't get on the net and go searching for news expecting to find "CNN" listed every other article. Most of the search engine "news" trackers are just shallow rerolls of AP, Reuters and selected big newspapers.
Power Surfing : Speed and Usability Tips
As you can deduce from the above, speed and site usability is paramount for the net news hound. News is probably the primary reason I started using Opera for a browser. Here are some general and specific tricks of the trade:
Filtering:
Proxy Filters: Probably the biggest speed up you can give yourself is a good proxy filter like Proxomitron. You can filter out all sorts of stuff with a good proxy filter. That will in turn speed up your surfing by multiples.
Hosts Files: Putting some of the large banner server addresses into your host file as local host can also do wonders. 'nuff said. Opera Specific:
I am sure that with your posting of these news sources, Webmasterworld will be a near to "just-in-time" summariser for all things relevant to the members here.
Agree that Moreover has gone downhill fast - their non-disclosed paid listings is enough to make MSN blush. Add to that many of their news headlines links go to resgistration screens and subscribe screens. Its a model that is on its last legs I feel. Asking news providers to pay for results has been its downfall. We have a Moreover newsfeed on their "management" category. every second headline is about Accenture, who seem to have paid to be exposed in that category.
Some excitement for me at least, with desktop news aggregators (there are two VERY good ones) and using RSS to deliver targeted news headlines on Websites. Good open source stuff and software is available.
I also find blogdex more useful than Daypop sometimes due to the way you can configure the results output personally and save as a cookie.
Comprehensive as usual.
Proxy Filters: Probably the biggest speed up you can give yourself is a good proxy filter like Proxomitron. You can filter out all sorts of stuff with a good proxy filter. That will in turn speed up your surfing by multiples.
Can you explain that? How does that make reading a web page faster?
Would that happen to be Webmaster World? As far as I'm concerned, there is no other SEO/SEM news resource that can compare.
Why should you spend the time scouring those news resources when there are hundreds who visit and lurk here who are just waiting for the chance to post a Breaking Search Engine News story or something similar.
I have one link for SEO/SEM News and that's to this forum. Well, I do visit a couple of others...
[siliconvalley.com...]
Otherwise, my main course is here - thanks to Brett and other "breaking news" posters. Keep up the great work!
Love that proximotron! A slight overkill in some aspects but I'm not complaining - just need one for Mac now (as well as mouse gestures!)
