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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 |
| 5. Int 'l Herald Tribune
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2.25 |
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THE HEADLINES: Eleven RSS feeds were searched through the Yahoo! Pipes software: Editorial/Opinion; Africa and Middle East; Africa and Middle East by AP; Asia - Pacific; Asia - Pacific by AP; Europe; Europe by AP; Americas; Americas by AP; Business; Business by AP. The quality of the search results varied widely. Sometimes more than 50 percent of “today’s” stories found on the website searches came through the RSS feeds; sometimes less than 25 percent came through. Searches conducted through the news feeds more reliably returned results similar to the website when secondary news stories (i.e. “Sudan”) were searched for—in part, because fewer stories were found on the actual news site. Searches on the RSS feeds for the larger stories (i.e. “Iraq”) less reliably mirrored the results returned from the web searches. |
| Other Issues: |
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Almost all of the stories written by IHT came through the web site search as NYT stories. When these same stories came through the RSS feeds, it was confusing because when the link was clicked, the byline did not say NYT next to the author's name. Stories from the Associated Press were the only other stories that show up through the feed and the website, and about half of those stories that came up on the website search appeared on the feed. |
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The stories that came through the RSS feeds appeared to be relatively timely as they were mostly from "today," But it was hard to tell to the hour how timely they were because neither the website or the RSS feeds listed what times the articles were posted. For example, in a story about a bombing in Iraq, the article on the RSS feed said about 180 people were dead; the article on the website said more than 200 were dead. The website article was the more updated version. The website stories were updated daily, but on occasion, there was be a discrepancy between the date posted in the URL toolbar and the date attached to the article. |
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Neither the site search nor the RSS feeds returned any multimedia results. |
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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. The website gave the headline, byline, date, sources (such as the NYT or AP) and summary information. Neither gave the time the article was posted, which would have been useful. |
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On both the RSS and web searches, over half of the stories were archived, going back as far as January 2007. On the web site searches, the current day's stories and stories from throughout the week were not in order. One had to search back, sometimes as many as seven web site pages, to find all of "today's" articles. |
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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. |
(Danielle Hayner and Sarah Merkey) |
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