Search engines for news junkies

Are you a news junkie-the kind of person who has to be the first to know about the most recent Washington scandal, or the hottest happenings on Wall Street, or perhaps the latest Middle East crisis? If so, then the news-specific search engines on the Internet are there to feed your habit.

One of the more sophisticated search engines for news is Newsbot http://www.newsbot.com. Newsbot scans over 150 Web sites and uses its own search algorithm to build subject sets of browsable headlines. The site permits boolean search techniques and allows you to sort search results by date or relevancy. If you are looking for the most up-to-the-minute news, try Newshub at http://www.newshub.com, which has updates every 15 minutes. If international news is important to you, then NewsIndex at http://www.newsindex.com and TotalNews at http://www.totalnews.com should find a place on your browser's bookmark list.

The Web site with the most extensive archives is NewsLibrary at http://www.newslibrary.com. NewsLibrary differs from other news search engines in that it is fee-based (typical charge for an article is $1.95), and provides access to a digital archive of news articles for major U.S. newspapers, with archival coverage for some papers going back to the mid to late 1980s. Other news-only search engines worth exploring are NewsTracker at http://nt.excite.com, NewsTrawler at http://www.newstrawler.com, Northern Light's Current News at http://www.northernlight.com/news.html and Paperboy at http://www.paperboy.net.

You'll find these news engines and much more on the redesigned BISON (Libraries' Web) "Search Engine" page at http://ublib. buffalo.edu/libraries/search/searchint.html.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Gemma DeVinney and Don Hartman, University Libraries