The Financial Times New Search Engine

The Financial Times Group of the UK has launched a new search engine called Newssift. The search engine does a good job by suggesting useful ways of filtering your search results. With the arrival of Microsoft's Bing, suddenly my free news search options have expanded beyond my old favourite Google News.

Once you enter your search terms, Newssift presents you with pick lists of filters in the following categories:

• Business Topic
• Organization
• Place
• Person
• Theme

It works surprisingly well for my news searches.

Each of these major categories can also be further filtered by clicking any of the More Options buttons. I found it very easy to rapidly reduce the number of hits my searches return by using these options.

Newssift further enriches your search results with a number of nice analytic touches. These include sentiment analysis and a breakdown of source categories, and the top 7 organisations, places, people and 

themes. As you can see from the pictures, all of these results are presented visually and another nice touch is the extra information revealed when you mouse over each category.

A minor question is why the top 7 in each area?

Newssift can do all of this because of its focus on news, and only news. Sources used appear to meet my expectations as they cover:

• Online News
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Newswires
• Research
• Blogs
• News Portals
• Television & Radio

This is all very impressive and I have put Newssift on my toolbar - but if you think you are getting free access to the Financial Times newspaper - think again. While matching FT articles are included in the search results and analysis I've talked about above, clicking on the FT article summary takes you to their normal (primarily paid) registration offers. 

The 'cherry on the cake' is that at the end of my filtering, the matching news articles to my searches are both right on topic and more numerous than in both Bing and Google. And that's just they way I want it. Thanks FT!

Comments

[Steve Bennett]

Something about the underlying technology used:

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Financial Times Newssift.com Relies on Nstein to Power Text Mining

Nstein Technologies Inc. a leader in digital publishing solutions for newspapers, magazines, and online content providers, announced today that Newssift, a business insight tool launched by FT Search Inc., and an independent entity within the Financial Times Group, has launched its beta powered by Nstein's TME (Text Mining Engine).

Newssift provides business professionals access to a comprehensive database of millions of articles from thousands of global business news sources. A next generation vertical search tool, Newssift searches are based on meaning and relationships to enable business users to extract insight and discovery without the commercial clutter of traditional keyword search. To index and extract all entities (the people, places and organizations) of more than 80,000 articles a day, FT Search conducted an exhaustive evaluation of vendors, and chose Nstein because of both its technology and professional services group.

“Nstein proved that it had both the most robust technical solution -- and service professionals who were willing to work with enthusiasm to become an extension of the FT Search team,” said Robin Johnson, CEO of Newssift. “Newssift is free and supported by advertising, and will plan to add a premium subscription service soon. We have a number of advertisers lined up to sponsor and are planning to deliver contextually matching ads to content – at a premium,” stated Johnson.

“FT is the most recognized brand in financial information,” said Luc Filiatreault, President and CEO of Nstein Technologies. “By creating a platform whereby they can aggregate financial news, categorize it and tag it, FT Search is poised to being a critical resource for those who value timely and relevant financial insight and information.

Nstein Technologies is the online provider of choice for many of the world's leading media companies, including: Financial Times, Cedrom-SNI, Hearst Newspapers, Reed Business Information, Scripps Network, Bonnier Corporation and Transcontinental Media.
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[Daniel Tunkelang]

Steve, thanks for blogging about Newssift! For more info, check out the post I wrote when it launched: http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/03/18/financial-times-endeca-newssift/

[James Beresford]

I like it - starts to show the direction search engines are going to have to move in now the web is getting a bad case of information overload.

Categorised filters will healp greatly in searching for terms that apply across subjects - and probably the next goldmine for SEO outfits.