Any search engine ninjas out there?

April 11, 2006 3:49 PM

Does this exist? Search tool that displays multiple results from various news sources.

This one is for all you search experts out there. Here's what I would like to do:

Let's say I have three companies that I am keeping tabs on and trying to follow all their news. Is there a search engine or Web 2.0 app that will let me plug in three or more companies (let's say Apple, Microsoft, Sun) and then display a single page with links for all their news stories (AP, Reuters, blogs, etc.)?

In other words, I could plug in Apple, Microsoft, and Sun on a page and it would return a page like this:

Apple
- story a (link)
- story b (link)
- story c (link)
- story d (link)

Microsoft
- story a (link)
- story b (link)
-story c (link)
- story d (link)

Sun
- story a (link)
- story b(link)
- story c (link)

Thoughts?

posted by zooropa to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Yahoo Finance will display all the news for given ticker symbols when doing a search, and you can sign in to customize the sources used to display this.
posted by kcm at 3:58 PM on April 11, 2006

Newsnow does this, (Microsoft, Apple) and while it doesn't display more than one subject at a time, I think you can subscribe and get a lot more options than what is on offer for free.
posted by fire&wings at 4:10 PM on April 11, 2006

You can customize the sections on Google News to show stories based on keywords. For instance, I have one section set up to display PEAK OIL stories for never-ending hilarity.
posted by cellphone at 4:20 PM on April 11, 2006

I can give you something similar that might be useful; I only discovered this by accident one day (it's really not promoted on the site very well.)

Yahoo! Finance offers news and commentary about specific companies; if you dig deep enough, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for news items about a single company. If you have a news reader, simply set up an RSS feed for each company you want to monitor, and you're done.

Depending on your news reader, you might be able to display the latest headlines in a multiple-company summary (as you've requested) or not; perhaps someone else here knows of a news reader that will handle that aspect of the request?

Here's the link to the relevant page on Yahoo! Finance: http://finance.yahoo.com/rssindex.
posted by davejay at 4:30 PM on April 11, 2006

forgot to shout out to kcm; providing this as an alternative to the yahoo! finanance link you provided
posted by davejay at 4:31 PM on April 11, 2006

Microsfot vs. Apple vs. Sun

Sun wins. Of course, that includes that big star in the sky.
posted by panoptican at 9:14 PM on April 11, 2006