Recently, there was a minor earthquake in Los Angeles and even before the news channels could broadcast the information, the news spread like wildfire through different mediums on the internet such as Twitter, social media sites and news aggregators.
In fact breaking news is in itself a fully fledged business on the internet and a huge number of blogs and websites work around the clock to get the news to its audience. Consequently, there are a huge number of news aggregators which claim to deliver the latest news to their visitors. Newsflashr is one such website which claims to be the all-in-one news search engine.
Newsflashr is like an aggregator of aggregators. It aggregates headlines from popular news-oriented sites like Google News, BBC News, MSNBC and even from sites like Techmeme, Technorati and Twitter. You just need to type your query into the search box and it’ll display the related news from sources on a single page.
When you hover your mouse over a particular headline, it pops up a box containing further details on that piece of news in 3-4 sentences. You can customize the number of headlines per feed but it doesn’t offer you the possibility to move the feeds or set them according to your priority.
Newsflashr offers two kind of views - ‘topic’ view and ‘feeds’ view. The feeds view, as you can see in the screenshot above, lets you scan specific news across various sites. However, in ‘topics’ view, it displays the current hot topics and shows news related to them sorted by time or sorted by the Alexa Rank of feeds.
It also offers a horizontal slider which can be used to adjust the freshness of the news within the timeframe of 1 to 7 hours. There’s also a tag cloud of popular headline topics which lets you choose your topic of interest and view the latest news related to that topic. There is also a bookmark (”Add This”) link which helps you to bookmark a story to the popular social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon and many more.
Hence Newsflashr could be an interesting site, especially for news lovers since it works towards eliminating the need to visit different news sources to check the news about the same topic.
Of course it needs improvements like more customization options and better ranking of feeds (currently Alexa is the only parameter which it considers while ranking the feeds). We can certainly expect more features on this site in the future. Till then try it out and let us know what do you think.
