Reliability:Do RSS search results match website's search results?
Inclusiveness:Does RSS offer non-staff & archived stories (if also come through website search)?
Key info: Does RSS give headline/summary, date, time, reporter?
Timeliness: Are RSS stories as timely as those from website search?
Excellent
Very Good
Acceptable
Not Acceptable
Overall Score
Reliability
Inclusiveness
Key Info
Timeliness
7. Newsweek
1.75
THE HEADLINES: Four feeds were used on Yahoo! Pipes: World News, Top News, and two columnists’s feeds, those of Christopher Dickey and Fareed Zakaria. The RSS feeds appeared to return few of the stories that came through the same keyword search on Newsweek’s website, whether there was minimal news on the topic for which the search was conducted (i.e. “Sudan”) or more extensive coverage on the search term (i.e. “Iraq”). In part that might have been because of the problems in the website search that appeared to rank by relevance (although even that wasn’t clear) rather than by date, so it was difficult to determine by scrolling through the first dozen pages of the website search returns whether the results were the same.
Other Issues:
All the stories that came up on both the website and the RSS feed searches were staff written.
Both the website and the RSS feed searches returned archived stories—many were from weeks and even years prior to the search. Also in both cases the searches returned results not in chronological order, so it was hard to determine what was timely.
Both the website and the RSS feed searches returned multimedia results.
Search results for the RSS feeds gave the articles’ headlines/summaries. The RSS feeds of the two columnists signaled in the headline when an article was written by the columnist. The website searches returned the headlines/summaries and the dates of the results.
The RSS feeds appeared to be consistent in what they pulled from the website through a series of consecutive searches.