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Reliability: Do RSS search results match website's search results?
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Inclusiveness: Does RSS offer non-staff & archived stories (if also come through website search)?
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Key info: Does RSS give headline/summary, date, time, reporter?
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| Timeliness: Are RSS stories as timely as those from website search? |
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Excellent |
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Very Good |
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Acceptable |
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Not Acceptable |
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Overall Score |
Reliability |
Inclusiveness |
Key Info |
Timeliness |
| 7. Al Jazeera English |
1.75 |
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THE HEADLINES: Six RSS feeds were searched through the Yahoo! Pipes software: Al Jazeera Africa, Middle East, Europe, Central/S. Asia, Asia Pacific, and America. There were major discrepancies between searches conducted through the RSS feeds and those through the website. Searches through the feeds only returned a few of “today’s” articles. Most of what came through was archived — much of it over a month old. The stories brought up through the RSS feeds were usually not current and often there were very few stories returned. Articles found through the RSS searches did not match up with those found through the website searches. Thousands of articles were returned after a typical website search, but fewer than ten usually came through on the searches through the RSS feeds. When the first few pages of the website search were compared with the RSS search results, the stories did not match. |
| Other Issues: |
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Very few of the articles discovered in the website searches included a byline. The study was unable to attribute the articles found through the searches to Al Jazeera or any other media outlet. The assumption was that the articles found were written by Al Jazeera staff writers because they were not attributed to a wire service. It was difficult therefore to determine whether the RSS feeds returned non-staff generated stories. |
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Search results for the RSS feeds showed the articles’ headlines/summaries, but other information was only available after clicking through to the full articles. An overview of date, time, author and summary would have been more useful and informative. |
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Although the RSS feeds brought up many up-to-date articles, often more that half were archived. This could be partly due to the very disorganized website. Every search brought up almost 10,000 articles and they were not in chronological order. |
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When ten consecutive searches were run on the website, spaced by ten seconds each, the number of stories changed. For example: a first search yielded 9,874, a second search the same, a third search 10,344, a fourth search 9,874. |
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Al Jazeera’s website search engine was marginally more reliable for bigger stories (i.e “Iraq”) in part because secondary stories (i.e. “Sudan”) were harder to find on an already difficult-to-navigate website. |
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There did not seem to be any multimedia on Al Jazeera’ website that came through the searches. The RSS searches did not return any multimedia results either. |
(Catherine Citroni and Nikkee Porcaro) |
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