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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 |
| 6. The Guardian
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2 |
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THE HEADLINES: Six RSS feeds were searched through the Yahoo! Pipes software: Front page, World latest, UK latest, Comment, Leaders, Politics and Film News. On average, the six RSS feeds returned only a slight fraction of “today’s” stories that came up on The Guardian’s website search, but on a day when a secondary news story was searched for (the search term was” Sudan” – the news was possible UN sanctions against Sudan and President Bush’s related speech at the Holocaust Museum) the feeds did not return any stories. Overall, the slim RSS results very poorly matched the wealth of stories and multimedia found on the website search. |
| Other Issues: |
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All stories that came through on the website search were staff written from the Guardian or its sister paper the Observer and consequently all stories that appeared through the feed were staff written. |
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The website search repeatedly brought up archived stories that went back more than a month, but none of these stories came through the feeds. There was only one day that the feeds pulled up an archived story, but it was only one day old and seemed to be misdated. |
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Only occasionally did the website search pull up multimedia, and in those cases it was archived information and didn’t make it through the feeds. |
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The RSS feeds were consistent in what they pulled from the website. When 10-12 consecutive searches were run through the feeds, the results remained the same. |
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The stories that came through the RSS feeds appeared to be relatively timely as they were from "today." However, the Guardian doesn’t time-stamp its articles online. The only information it gives is the date and summary – making it impossible to judge precisely how timely RSS feeds runs articles from the website. But it is evident that the RSS feeds don’t begin to return all of “today’s” stories (or multimedia) available through a search on the website. |
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Search results for both the RSS feeds and the web searches gave the articles’ headlines /summaries; 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. |
(Hadass Kogan and Lisa Rassenti) |
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