Topix Searching the Web for You

We would like to introduce you to Topix News. (Results for Lynchburg, Virginia) Each and every zip code in the United States now has its own personal news complier. Both email updates and rss feeds are available. And while they have offered this service to every locality in the United States, they are expanding worldwide.

Topix was started in 1998 by a group that left the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) that was making the largest human edited directory on the internet. 60,000 people have and still work indexing websites of value on the internet.

Topix took a different path replacing people with robot editors. The robot editors have software modules that “crawl, cluster and categorize articles.”

Constantly, the Topix robots are crawling news stories from over 4,000 sources the base expands daily. Relevant news from sources from college newspapers to major publications are located for every locality.

And their service does not stop there.

Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix.Net says:

“The goal for Topix.net is to make a web page about everything -- every person, place, and thing in the world.”

“The final step is the Robo-Editor, which picks the best stories for display. For example, our 2004 Presidential Election page may have seen 1,000 articles for the past hour. The Robo-Editor's job is to pick the 10 best articles to show the user to give them a good overview of the news.”

Source: Resource Shelf