Topix, the local news community that allows readers to submit and edit stories, has secured deals with six content providers as it moves to establish itself as a one-stop-shop for local information.

Topix will now use Eventful as an events database, and will offer current TV and movie listings through Zap2It. InfoUSA will supply business directories, and the site will begin using LiveDeal for pet classifieds. Topix will be using Apartments.com to flesh out their apartment listings, and will use Informa Research Services to provide mortgage rate information.

The company originally launched Topix.net (now Topix.com) in 2004 as an automated aggregator of local news. In 2007 the site relaunched to allow users to add and modify news stories.

Topix is clearly moving towards becoming a central hub for localized information rather than simply a news site. While the new features are logical extensions to what they’ve offered in the past, Topix may be trying to differentiate itself from Google News, which introduced local news earlier this year and has a much higher readership.

Topix has made a name by aggregating tens of thousands of local news sources and aggregating them online (they also like citizen journalists). It was only a matter of time before Google expanded their news product to compete more directly with Topix. That time has come – today Google added an option for customized local news to its Google News service.

The localization option is now available on news.google.com, but does not seem to have been rolled out to country specific news portals as yet. Using the service is as simple as entering your post/ zip code or location into the Local News option box that now appears automatically when you visit Google News.

The feature pulls news stories based on your location, and are presented as a sub-section on the main Google News page, and have a sidebar menu entry and dedicated page as well.

According to Google:

As always, results will be clustered with multiple sources on a story. The top stories for a given area will be at the top of your results. Our article rankings will also take into account a publication’s location so we can promote all the local sources for each story.

Google News attracts a far larger audience than Topix – 47 million/month v. just 6.2 million for Topix (Comscore, December 2007 worldwide audience), but until now they have not provided good local news coverage. Topix now has some serious competition.

This is a quick post because I’m getting on a plane to Europe, but fast-growing news site Topix has a new CEO. Rich Skrenta has stepped down, and VP Marketing Chris Tolles has taken his position. See Tolles’ blog post on this here, and everyone’s bios here.

The official explanation is below. The real explanation will come out soon, I’m sure:

Even though we were seeing eye-to-eye on what needed to be done, after the press tour and some initial conversation about where we needed to go, Rich told me that he wasn’t having as much fun right now, and looking at what we needed to do, didn’t see much opportunity for what he really loves to do — architect from the metal on up and put out the 1.0 that is so far ahead of everything else.

See our coverage of the company here. They’ve raised around $20 million in funding.

News site Topix.net will relaunch this evening under their newly acquired domain name Topix.com. They are also launching a new product that will allow readers to write and edit local news articles directly.

The news was first written about by USA Today this afternoon. Topix is partly funded by USA Today’s parent company, Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune.

Topix already has local news pages for cities and towns across the United States and Canada (here’s the page for Atherton, CA). The news is auto-generated for those pages currently. Tonight, Topix will let users of the site become local editors, and write or expand on articles that will be of interest to that community.

Topix started allowing readers to leave comments on the site just over a year ago. The first editors will be selected from heavy commenters on the site.

Screen shots below. See the Topix corporate blog, and CEO Rich Skrenta’s personal thoughts as well.

News search engine Topix.net has announced that has taken $15 million in additional funding from three large media companies, Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy. The company raised a round about 18 months ago for an undisclosed sum that was only said to be under $5 million. That funding came from Tribune, Gannet and Knight-Ridder, who have since been acquired by McClatchy.

Topix brings a long list of features to news search and focuses on local information.

The company was started by several founders of the DMOZ directory. The company says that it is currently experiencing substantial growth, something that traffic analysts Hitwise confirm. Hitwise reported in September that Topix’s market share in online news had grown 24% in one month since an August relaunch, that the site gets more traffic than the LA Times and the NY Post; Topix visitors were unusually weighted towards states like Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina and its users were 29% more likely to be over the age of 55 than the average Internet user.

What does Topix offer that Yahoo! News and Google News don’t? A few things. When Topix relaunched in August, the company said its index had grown to include 50,000 news sources – 10 times more than the Google News and 7 times as large as Yahoo! News. Topix has topical pages, has strong search by zip code, integrates relatively active forums and visualization. The year long time line displayed with every search is a fast way to skip to a particular date in a news search and shows the context of the point in time you are skipping to. Try using the timeline on Topix and then try to accomplish the same result with Yahoo or Google news search. Topix also has the most extensive support for RSS.

Though traffic stats have to be taken with a giant grain of salt, look at those demographics intersecting with the feature set. Topix is proof that you can load a site up with features and still win over mainstream users.

The company provides local and national news to online publications owned by their investors like the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun. Topix also powers Ask.com’s local search and says it has other distribution deals with Yahoo!, Bloglines, Newsgator, CitySearch and several other large sites.

Topix has always been a forward looking company; before Google starting moving to integrate blog search and news search and offer search results more than a few weeks old, Topix had done both of those well for more than a year. Why they need almost $20 million in investment over the last two years is unclear, but it can’t be denied that they are doing a good job of providing a valuable service to many online properties and are creating a rich experience for users once they are drawn in.

I look forward to seeing more exciting things come from this company. Local search is becoming increasingly competitive, but when it comes to news and features, Topix is a key site to watch.

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.

Topix.net added 15,000 top blogs into its news engine today.

Unlike Yahoo, which took the step of integrating blog search results into the news area but pushed them off to the side, Topix has integrated blog posts into results in the same manner as their other 12,000 news feeds.

The Topix blog post announcing the addition gives great information on how they chose the 15,000 feeds, and how blog coverage differs from traditional news coverage. Good stuff. I’m really happy to see this.