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New Site, Newssift.com, Searches Business-Related News

Newssift.com offers a new means of navigating 4,000 news sources, with sentiment analysis to tell you if the overall news about a topic is good or bad.

There's a new search site to try when you're researching companies or topics (and perhaps you seek a change from Google News): Newssift.com. This site from FT Search (an entity within the Financial Times Group that's funded by yet independent of the parent group) provides a search tool for navigating some of the web content FirstRain aggregates for its information subscribers. Specifically, Newssift has chosen 4,000 of the news sources FirstRain crawls through on a regular basis to be represented on its site. One of those sources, naturally, is the Financial Times. Newssift pays a subscription fee to FirstRain for the use of its aggregation service.

Newssift has been under development since last July and is still in beta mode. In addition to the typical keyword search, it lets users filter search results by business topic, organization, place, person or theme. It extends the sentiment analysis FirstRain provides, which attempts to illustrate in a pie chart the tone of the aggregated news stories on a topic. (For instance, a search for "IBM Sun" a few days after their merger talks collapsed showed a mostly red, for negative, pie chart.) Unlike FirstRain, which offers news analytics and reports on a subscription basis, Newssift lets visitors use its site for free and will rely on advertising for revenue. FT Search is in the early stages of developing a subscription model with additional features and customization. It also plans to increase the amount of content Newssift ingests by 25 percent over the next six weeks.

The site is due to emerge out of beta shortly. "We hope it's sooner rather than later," says John Greenleaf, chief marketing officer. "We have an enormous amount of interest from advertisers and we're anxious to help them get started with us. We're getting input from users and using that to make improvements to the site."

Greenleaf declined to share visitor or page-view numbers for the site. "It's a modest number today because the only efforts we've put behind the site so far are talking to the financial and technology media, to get some of the most critical eyes to take a look at what we've done," he says. "Traffic's building slowly, with no consumer efforts.

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