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October 19, 2005
Inform - A Different Way of Looking at the News
No one can complain about a scarcity of news content. There's a LOT of news on the web, some of which probably isn't really fit to print, from both free sites, and not so free ones. But one can legitimately whine about the difficulty of finding RELEVANT news, no more and no less. To my mind, a controlled vocabulary, preferably one reviewed by real people, is crucial to finding what you want. Full-text searching on its own isn't enough.
The news offered by Lexis and Westlaw include indexing terms, but they don't put these important terms front & center, rather they hide them in segments, requiring users to ferret them out and then try to determine how to make use of them.
They could learn something from Inform.com, a new beta site that aggregates and indexes hundreds of newspapers and magazines. Inform apparently knows a not-so-well-kept secret of researchers who use index terms to increase the relevancy of news search results, that is, the best way to find the appropriate index terms for your particular search is to find an relevant article in any way you can, usually by running a full-text search, then seeking out the index terms applied to that article and using them to refine and expand your search. This process is usually not the domain of the beginning searchers.
But Inform indexes the news, then offers a slew of features based on that indexing, making it easy for the user to find additional articles on any facet or topic related to the currently viewed article. For example, select an article from the front page. The full-text is displayed with a menu across the top, called the Discovery Area, which includes links for People, Places, Organizations, Topics, Industries and Products. I'm looking at an article on American Airlines. If I want to read more about the general state of the airline industry, I can select Industry from the top for a new list of articles. Or I can select People, and click on Ron Hunter for additional articles relating to him. I'm hoping that RSS feeds for custom channels are in the works.
There's much more here, but you can explore yourself. I've only touched the surface of Inform's capabilities. All I can say is, it's a different way of looking at the news.
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