Review of DayPop Weblog and News Search Engine

[Infoadvis2 at aol.com]

(cross posted: apologies for any duplication)

Greetings Information Professionals,

Below is an excerpt from an article in the November 2001 issue of The 
Information Advisor, which examined the DayPop search engine for news and 
Weblogs, and compared it to our other favorite news search engine, 
Morevoer.com.  If there are questions or comments, feel free to call or email 
me directly at rberkman at aol.com.

The full article provides additional information on the use of Weblogs by 
serious researchers, and a table comparing the features of DayPop with 
Moreover.com  (Other articles in the November 2001 issue include: A Table 
Comparing Features of Internet Discussion Group Monitoring Services; Best 
Sites for locating Official International Statistical Data; and How to 
Evaluate Personal and Anecdotal Information on the Web).

Robert Berkman
Editor
The Information Advisor
www.informationadvisor.com
Falmouth MA
508-540-5185
rberkman at aol.com

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(Excerpt from the November, 2001 Information Advisor)
DayPop, Web Logs, Bloggers-You Call This Serious News?
 
DayPop (www.daypop.com) is a new search engine that allows you to search for 
current news and opinions, and it's giving our current favorite news 
aggregator, Moreover (www.moreover.com), a run for its money. Here's the 
lowdown on this intriguing news search engine, which was just launched this 
past August.

DayPop is a news search engine with a twist. Its main distinction is that in 
addition to allowing you to search about 1,000 current Web-based news 
sources, DayPop also searches thousands of Web logs.

Ultimately, we were impressed with this site not because it included Web logs 
but because of its outstanding design, speed, intelligent features, and very 
useful news search capabilities. Chan told us that he built his search engine 
from scratch using C and Perl, and in its look and features it actually 
reminded us quite a bit of Google. Like Google, DayPop has a sparse and lean 
look, which is a big plus. And, DayPop's search protocols are quite similar 
to Google, specifically:

    Multiple words default to AND
    Quotation marks are used for phrases
    A plus sign overrides stop words
    Keywords are returned in context and in boldface
    Each indexed page is cached
    Advanced searching allows limits by language and country

Results are returned in order of relevancy. The only features we didn't find 
in DayPop that would be useful are the ability to use an OR operator, 
stemming, and limiting keywords to a title field.

Bottom line-has DayPop replaced Moreover as our favorite news aggregator? 
Well, what we liked about Moreover was its timeliness, coverage of top 
quality sources, value for information professionals, and speed. The same 
goes for DayPop.

We performed some test searches comparing the two head to head, on both 
general and business news items. Both performed admirably in quickly 
returning relevant articles from top-quality news sources (ranging from The 
Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News to MSNBC, Fortune, Business Week, 
Chicago Tribune, and Pravda).

We'd recommend both services, but be aware that each offers certain 
advantages over the other. In Moreover's favor is the ability to use Boolean 
operators, which can be quite important for certain searches. We also like 
the fact that it groups its sources into categories so you can view all its 
sources. As for DayPop, we like date restrictions, the cached pages, and 
language/country limits. And then, of course, there are those intriguing Web 
logs (which you can search separately or at the same time as general news 
sources). Also, DayPop does not restrict you to a maximum of 20 returned 
pages, as Moreover does. So, bottom line: we now have two favorite current 
news search engines: Moreover and DayPop.


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The Information Advisor, (http://www.informationadvisor.com) is an 
international monthly journal founded in 1987, is a guide for information 
professionals who rely on its articles to help them identify, compare, and 
select the best business sources from the myriad of information products and 
services available, whether in print, on a professional database or on the 
Web.

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