The Good News About News Bots

NewsTrawler

NewsTrawler has hundreds of international news sources at its disposal, but only lets you select up to twenty sources at a time for your searches. If you want to look through only a few publications, but for our money, it defeats the purpose of a bot.

The home page presents topics such as business and finance, computer and Internet, English-language world news, general knowledge and hobbies, health, home and society, and law. All topics have links to related news stories.

Strangely, the site requires you to search for news items only from within various categories, which is clumsy. After you select a category, you must manually choose the newspapers, magazines, Web-based news sources, Web references, and journals that you want the bot to examine, checking off each source, which is a nuisance. On the plus side, the site does remember your selections for future searches.

We appreciated the bot's international and comprehensive nature.  And, despite only checking ten publications at a time, the site found more than 400 entries for "Gore".  However, many people will find that the clumsy interface requires too much effort.