The Good News About News Bots

Excite NewsTracker

Excite NewsTracker examines over 300 quality sites.  It also provides users with a polished interface.

For starters, the home page offers lots of categories - business, sports, entertainment, science, and more - with links to the latest related stories.  In addition, NewsTracker searches for documents that contain the keywords that you enter into its search box, and also looks for concepts that are related to your key words.

For example, the bot recognizes items that relate to "senior citizens" when you search on the word "elderly."  A danger with search synonym-based searching is that they will turn up hits you don't want, but that wasn't the case in our tests. 

On the downside, the site offers no options for Boolean searches, which use the modifiers AND, OR and NOT to refine searches.  After searching, the bot displays the top five matches, and a click takes you to additional choices.

As we expected, NewsTracker found numerous matches on "Gore" ― well over 200 stories ― with top stories from the Reuters and AP wire services. There were a generous number of hits for "Recycling."

For the search for "Schulz," NewsTracker found stories that related indirectly to Charles Schulz, and were only a few weeks old. As with the other news bots, we discovered that they typically only offer recent stories, not going much further back than a couple of weeks.  If you want stories from a few months back, you'll probably have to forego the bots and pay a fee to get the story from a site for a specific newspaper or magazine.

Overall, Excite NewsTracker delivers pertinent stories from a variety of sources, but could use more powerful search tools.