Topix.net, possibly the most feature rich news search engine online already, has relaunched and looks very cool. The Topix index of 50,000 news sources is 10 times larger than the Google News index and 7 times as large as Yahoo! News. Topix really focuses on local search. Today’s relaunch makes the search results on Topix much easier to use than they have been before.
Founded in 2002 by some of the creators of the DMOZ open directory project, majority stake in Topix is now owned by media companies Gannett, McClatchy/Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company.
The best new feature in this week’s relaunch is the visual timeline for the number of results from each day in the last year. It’s like Technorati’s blog search timeline, but on Topix you can click any point in the visual and see results from that day and prior. Google and Yahoo News results only go back 30 days or less.
Searches on Topix are now case sensitive, so you can search for “IT” for example, without getting a page full of results for the word “it.”
Search results from blogs are highlighted with a little blue “B” next to the story titles. Integrating blog and news search results by default is a nice touch. Words in the result excerpts that have their own dedicated topic pages are highlighted and display a drop down box of their own recent results.
With forums and classified ads and loads of news categories, Topix really flirts with feature overload. In the past, pages been too messy to use. This week’s relaunch is focused on some very helpful changes though and makes this powerful site easier to use. In fact, I’d say it’s gone from being almost unusable to being a uniquely powerful news search service.
Comments
Topix and - anyone else see the similarity in the logo?
Wow I just found it a couple days ago and though it was a great site. Love the fact you can have RSS feeds on any keyword and the keyword is constantly updated. Very nice.
Very clean look and easy to navigate.
Wow, very nice! I’m with mojaam, RSS on any keyword that is being updated constantly is nice.
Topix is on top again! Thanks to Marshall for lettting us all know. One stop news shopping for sure. It will replace a few others in my “Morning Coffee”
Nice interface, wide scope… but poor results. Most of the classification is generalized from the content and consequently trying to limit a search to sources from a specific geographic area (other than the US) returns results from all over… ie: Afghanistan returns blog results from Americans commenting stateside, rather than just indigenous sources.
Jared, I do think it’s best for US domestic news. Ironic since it has so many sources.
I visited it when it was first mentioned on the site a couple of days ago and I love it. Their directory is very thorough and has basically anything you’re interested in. Plus RSS feeds for each directory is a definite plus.
Minor correction: McClatchy owns Knight Ridder so you may not want to list both as owners.
Wow!
Great writeup! Glad you think we’re moving in the right direction. We’re painfully aware of the importance of design in connecting people to what we’re doing, and it’s especially gladdening to see your commmentary on usability.
With regard to local news from non-local sources…well, it’s news about the topic, not from the region. If the NY Times writes about afghanistan, we want the article in…well…the afghanistan page. That being said, we’ll have to think about providing news *from* a given area….
Anyway, more news soon.
Chris Tolles
VP Marketing
Topix.net
Interesting to see the discussions on this site:
http://www.topix.net/forum/ly/.....AJNA270O82
We use topix content to allow out merchants to place local news content on thier pages. It has been useful since the beginning. Our merchants want thier pages to have a local feel and the love the news (especially now that we give them control of it) I think I have sent a few other companies thier way as well since thier feeds are so easy to follow.
The real interesting stuff is the local commentary, here Topix is actually creating news and new content. We look forward to turning our merchants loose on that.
Full Disclosure, Tolles and I started http://www.spoke.com together and alot of our engineers have been working at Topix for a while, including 3 of my favorites. And as we all know, if Techcrunch hates http://www.jigsaw.com, they will really hate http://www.spoke.com since Spoke just released 30M+ unique people’s contact information onto the web in the last few weeks. In the end, Spoke is about to kill off alot of the high priced data providers by providing for free what InfoUSA has been charging massive amounts for. If you are the poor guy buried at Citigroup who buys anti intrusion software, some sales guy is about to hunt you down via Spoke.
I have to say that I liked the old interface better. New one is too cluttered for my tastes.
Too bad their topics are static, pre-made.
Local news location is limited to USA ??? Hey bozos ….95% of the people in this world don’t live in the USA.
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