net.TUTOR: News Sources

News Sources > 4: Search News Databases

4A: Web News Databases

Using a large Web search engine to find news stories is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Instead, use a specialized news-only database to focus your search. Web news databases are good bets for current event searching, because they include only the content from news sites and revisit these sites several times per day. Thus, the results are usually focused and timely.

Some examples are:

These news databases offers many excellent features. You can search for current news stories, photos, audio/video and more. The Advanced Search allows you to limit your search to words in the headline, date published, news source, and location, as shown in the illustration. See the Links page of this tutorial for additional news search engines.

Yahoo advanced search form

4B: Blog and RSS Search Engines

Search engines that focus exclusively on blogs and syndicated (RSS) news feeds from Web content providers are also useful. You can search for a current news topic and find both news feeds and opinion within hours of an event. Some examples are:

4C: Online Library News Databases

NOTE: The library (fee-based) sources below are provided by commercial publishers through special licensing arrangements. You must be affiliated with Ohio State University to connect to these sources. Check your library's Web site for databases they may provide.

Both Web news databases and those that the library subscribes to will help you to search for current news stories. But library databases usually offer more depth of coverage (that is, you can find older news stories as well) and offer more sophisticated searching features.

LexisNexis Academic is an excellent source for finding U.S. and international news stories. It includes transcripts of television and radio news broadcasts as well. This library subscription database allows you to specify:

Topical area (general, news, business, legal, people)
Type of source (news, English language or foreign, blogs, transcripts, etc.)
Specific sources or publications
Segments (headlines, lead paragraphs, full text, authors/bylines, etc.)
Time frame or exact date

Choose All News under the Search the News section to get to advanced features

One problem with full-text news sources is that your search may retrieve many articles not actually relevant to your need, since it finds the search words in all parts of the article text. LexisNexis Academic offers great flexibility for finding words in proximity to each other.

These additional search operators may be selected from the News Search menu or entered directly in General/Power Search to specify proximity:

W/p - words in same paragraph

W/s - words in same sentence

W/5 - within 5 words from each other

W/10 - within 10 words from each other

W/25 - within 25 words from each other

Example: Governor W/5 Taft will find Governor Robert Taft or Governor Bob Taft.

Check your library's home page to learn about news databases available online. Ohio State provides access to a variety of good online databases for locating news, including:

World News Connection is a U.S. government information service which provides both translated articles and summaries of news from non-U.S. media sources within 48-72 hours of the original publication.

Ethnic NewsWatch offers full text of articles from the ethnic, minority and native press. Spanish language searching is available.

More OSU News Databases

Activity

Try this search in Yahoo! News.

Select News Photos from the pull-down list next to the search box.
Search for the words: bird flu
Review the photos and captions.
Click on one of them to see an enlarged version. You can view a slide show of all the photos using the controls above the enlarged picture.

[Site opens in new window.]

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