Miscellaneous

7 News Trackers - Search Companies and Topics By Keyword

By PI Magazine (Tamara Thompson and Rosemarie Mesis)

There are many free news tracking sources that send alerts to your email, RSS reader or are stored at a web-accessible site. Don’t limit yourself to just one aggregator, such as Google News — which is easy to set up and has good coverage. I’ve gathered a list of some other keyword news search and tracking tools to uncover and keep track of the online mentions of your brand, client, opposition or topics of interest.

1. “Ultimate News Database” - infoPig (http://www.infopig.com)
View news on designated topics, by major news outlets or related to geographical regions. You can also construct queries of keywords and receive those in your newsreader.

2. “Personalized News Aggregator” - Meehive (http://www.meehive.com)
Build a newspaper style webpage with custom keywords. No RSS or email export. Invite others to view your page at Meehive or on your social network.

3. “Keyword-Based RSS Feed Generator” - Kebberfegg (http://www.researchbuzz.org/tools/kebberfegg.pl)
Send personalized keyword searches to your newsreader. Search the web, news, blogs and more. The news sources and aggregators identified are: BBC, NewsisFree, FeedsFarm, Google News, IceRocket News, NewsTrove News, RocketNews, Topix.net, FindArticles, Wired, Findory, Yahoo News, MSN News, Moreover, Go Articles, Highbeam.

4. “Most comprehensive index of popularly tracked categories” - Trackle (http://www.trackle.com)
Receive keyword matches on the web, in your email or by RSS. Select the “News and Politics” category to query headline, local, global and topical news sources.

5. USNPL Newspaper Search - (http://is.gd/4eoOV)
Formulate advanced search queries, just as you would at a major search engine, to retrieve results from all newspapers at this site. There’s no RSS feature.

6. “A Top 10 online newspaper destination” - Topix (http://topix.net)
There doesn’t seem to be a convenient RSS feed, so you’ll have to make your own. Create your RSS feed for this site with the URL:

http://www.topix.net/search/article?xml=1&q=%22keyword%22
Replace the term “keyword” with your word or phrase and paste the URL in your newsreader.

7. Real-Time conversation monitoring - Twitter (http://twitter.com)
Select users to follow, or track mentions of your keywords and receive updates by RSS. Other applications offer alternative ways of viewing results and more rapid returns than email, if you’re monitoring in the application. See Monitter (http://www.monitter.com) and TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com). These services use the Twitter search engine but the Twitter search (http://search.twitter.com) is more robust, and that’s also viewable in your newsreader. But this searches the postings not the Bio or Name fields. For that see Using Google?s New Features to Get Twitter Information (http://is.gd/4eo3F).

Full post as published by PI buzz on October 11, 2009 (boomark / email).