The Good News About News Bots

NewsHub

A solid bot, NewsHub can found a respectable number of pertinent stories and is particularly good at finding technology-related articles.

The home page features a generous listing of categories, including technology, tech-related public relations, U.S. news, science, financial, world, entertainment, health, and sports.

NewsHub is more bot-like than many other sites.  Specifically, it goes out to the Net every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, to update information from each site.

The site offers the most thorough search options.  By checking a box, you can tell the search engine to look for the full text that you've typed in. The site also accepts the Boolean AND, OR and NOT modifiers and recognizes pluses and minuses to indicate that whether terms need to appear, or not appear, in the same article.  You can also use quotation marks to wrap phrases.

In our tests, NewsHub produced 124 stories about Al Gore, primarily from ABC News and MSNBC. "Recycling" revealed 5 recent stories, and "Schulz" found only two stories. While NewsHub didn't bring up as many stories as NewsTracker, it offered the most thorough search tools of the bots here, which is a plus when you want to be precise.