The BBC News has an interesting feature where their stories link to other stories on the same subject from other news sources. See for example the story on, Chavez backer held over TV attack – on the right there are links to stories on the same subject from other news venues like the Philadelphia Inquirer. They even explain why the BBC links to other news sites.
How does it work?
The Newstracker system uses web search technology to identify content from other news websites that relates to a particular BBC story. A news aggregator like Google News or Yahoo News uses this type of technique to compare the text of stories and group similar ones together.
BBC News gets a constantly updating feed of stories from around 4000 different news websites. The feed is provided to us by Moreover Technologies. The company provides a similar service for other clients.
Our system takes the stories and compares their text with the text of our own stories. Where it finds a match, we can provide a link directly from our story to the story on the external site.
Because we do this comparison very regularly, our stories contain links to the most relevant and latest articles appearing on other sites.
Sounds like an interesting use of “real time” text analysis and an alternative to Google News. Could we implement something like that for blogs? The company that provides them with this is Moreover Technologies.