|
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 |
| 3. Washington Post |
2.75 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
THE HEADLINES: Seventeen RSS feeds were searched through the Yahoo! Pipes software: World News and Analysis From The Washington Post, Editorials and Opinions, Op-Ed Columns, Politics, Middle East, Iraq – Washington Post Continuing Coverage, Military News, Bush Administration, Elections, Africa, North America, South America, Central America, Asia/Pacific, Europe, National Security, Pentagon and Defense Department News, Today's Highlights. On average, the seventeen RSS feeds returned less than a quarter of “today’s” stories that came up on The Washington Post’s website (including the wire service stories), but on a day when a secondary news story was searched for (the search term was “Sudan” – the news was possible UN sanctions again Sudan and President Bush’s related speech at the Holocaust Museum) the feeds returned closer to 75 percent of stories. |
| Other Issues: |
 |
The seventeen RSS feeds for The Washington Post never returned stories that weren’t staff written, but more than three-quarters of the stories that typically came up on the website search were from outlets such as Reuters or AP. |
|
The website consistently brought up a broad range of archived stories that went back more than a month – only some of which came through the feeds. There was really no consistency in which stories came through the feeds and which didn’t. There was also no real consistency in the number of stories that came through the feeds. Neither the website nor RSS feeds pulled up multimedia, but on the website the multimedia could be searched for separately. |
|
The RSS feeds on occasion returned Washington Post stories that were posted less than an hour before the search was run. |
|
Search results for the RSS feeds gave the articles’ headlines/summaries and sometimes included other information such as the date and the place from which the story was reported. The website searches returned the stories’ headlines/summaries, date and byline and the place from which the story was reported. One could sort the website search results by relevance, date or “type”—“article,” or “section” or “special report,” etc. |
|
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. |
|
The website search engine had its own errors. When searching for bigger stories such as “Iraq,” often stories appeared more than once. Sometimes these stories were identical; other times they were only slightly modified with similar headings. Also the number of stories coming through the web searches often varied when the same search was conducted repeatedly in quick succession. Website searches produced different stories even while just clicking through the pages of the results. It was presumed this was due to new content being added, but this was often difficult, if not impossible to determine. With such varied results, multiple stories, and frequently changing results it was difficult to know exactly what stories were new at any given moment. |
(Graham Fitts and Catherine Citroni) |
|
|
|
