Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 122

MsnBc
Unfortunately, the MSN news search (newsbot.msnbc.msn.com) does not
ofer an advanced search form or even much searching help. However, it
does ofer quick searching, RSS feeds, and a source list at newsbot.msnbc.
msn.com/s/publishers.aspx so that you can determine what you're actually
searching through.
Building your queries
You're not going to have a lot of choices with MSNBC and there's not a lot
of guidance for special syntax. So just use as many words as you can to nar-
row your query.
hint
it's challenging to really narrow your query without special syntax,
but try. go over the list of sources to make sure this is an engine
you want to search.
Trapping
Despite the fact that the home page for MSN News Search is on MSNBC,
the results page is on Live Search. As with Live Search, just add &format=rss
to the end of your search results URL to get an RSS feed.
Possibilities
News search engines are quickly becoming an expected feature of Web
search engines, but there are other speciic engines too—ones that have
indexes that go back further than 30 days and ones that index things that
might be tough to ind on the Web.
Findarticles
FindArticles (indarticles.com) is ailiated with the LookSmart search
engine. But as a search engine, LookSmart isn't all that popular nowa-
days, whereas FindArticles is. It indexes over 10 million articles, many
of which FindArticles claims can't be found on the regular Web. Some
of the articles require payment, but FindArticles also has extensive free
information as well.