AltaVista Will Offer More Timely News to Web Surfers
Web search engine AltaVista will add an online newsstand to its main index today to make its results more topical and useful to surfers looking for up-to-the-minute information.
With the new service, Palo Alto-based AltaVista will automatically produce the top stories related to search requests.
Clicking on a news center at the top search page will provide an index of the latest online stories about the requested topic.
The new feature, licensed from San Francisco-based Moreover, addresses a glaring shortcoming for even the most powerful search engines.
Even though they have indexes covering a staggering amount of information on the Web, the top search engines rarely produce results that pick up on breaking news developments.
“This is definitely going to be a big plus for search engine users,” said Danny Sullivan, an industry analyst for Search Engine Watch.
“Right now, when you use a traditional search engine to find the latest news on the Web, you’re really using the wrong tool,” Sullivan said. “It’s like you are using a hammer when you really need a screwdriver.”
Terms of the licensing agreement weren’t disclosed, but Moreover doesn’t expect to make much money from the partnership.
Moreover Chief Executive Nick Denton said his company expects to make most of its money through licenses with companies that use the service on their Web sites or intranets.
The information void stems from how search engines find out what’s on the Web. The search engines rely on computers, known as “crawlers,” that comb most Web sites every 15 to 30 days and then update the search engines’ databases.
The lag time between when an article is first posted on a Web site and when it shows up in a search engine’s database means vital information might not be produced on a topic.
Moreover’s technology purports to deliver the latest articles, including information posted on the same day, by searching more than 2,400 newsy sites every 15 minutes or so. Some publishers pay Moreover to review their Web sites, a structure that could lead to news articles from some Web sites being featured more prominently in the search results.
Privately held Moreover’s lead investors include Reuters news service. Moreover has raised $21 million in venture capital and expects to be profitable a year from now, said Denton, a former business reporter for the Financial Times.
Moreover introduced its technology last summer but only recently began to license it to other sites. Before today’s announcement, Moreover’s highest-profile deal was with Inktomi Corp., which incorporated the specialty search engine at NBCi.com and IWon.com.
