Open Source version of Google News

August 13, 2004 12:17 AM

Is there an open-source web app that's anything like Google News -- ie. groups news stories by similarity?
posted by reklaw to computers & internet (3 comments total)

soemone here had a web site that sorted news stories. a greek name - costas? last i heard from him he was starting up a new company, iirc (although not connected with that site).

[searches around]

here it is. it was costas. i can't see any info about the source, though. you might email him and ask, i'm sure he wouldn't mind.
posted by andrew cooke at 6:12 AM on August 13, 2004

I've been using Today's Papers alot lately. Better than Google News IMO. More sources, more stories, and includes blogs.
posted by Lizc at 2:39 PM on August 13, 2004

Depends on what you mean by open-source; would you like to have the code to tweak the similarity algorithms? if so, I am not aware of any open source code-bases that do that.

Overall, in terms of article topic clustering I think Topix.net is the most impressive; in terms of personalization findory.com is very good too. Memigo.com (my site; thanks andrew for the plug, still trying to launch that startup :-) on the other hand is mostly a news serendipity engine, trying to show you stuff you'll probably like with tons of other features.

If you want to do similarity yourself, I wish you good luck, as it certainly not easy. You could probably put something together if you started from an open source search engine, Lucene being my current favorite (from the design specs and from its performance in Lookout, not from personal use for development).
posted by costas at 9:37 PM on August 13, 2004