Snappy news

Snap, a search upstart from Idealab's Bill Gross, is joining the news wars. This week, the company licensed services from Moreover Technologies to introduce a news aggregation Web site, News.snap.com. Like Google News, Yahoo News and countless others, the service lets people search for headlines among thousands of online news sources. Unlike many others, Snap offers a signature feature--a tool to narrow results with each letter typed.

On a separate note, Google's pending patent for ranking news by credibility is being called out by a cofounder of Moreover. David Galbraith, who no longer works at Moreover, wrote on his blog that Moreover likely holds "prior art" from 2001 on Google's proposed method for sorting the news. Google's army of lawyers must have spotted that one before, however.