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.
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:
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:
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:
Try this search in Yahoo! News.
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