August 6, 2008 12:01 AM PDT

Newsflashr.com aggregates the aggregators

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In the category of yet-another-news-tracker, Newsflashr.com added search engine to its news aggregation service, which was launched in February this year. It searches across feeds from popular news-oriented sites, such as Yahoo News, Google News, Digg, MSNBC and even Twitter, delivering results by source.

Newsflashr.com doesn't offer filtering mechanisms, except ranking sites via Alexa, which is an unrefined indication of popularity rather than relevance to the search result. "Our approach is to leave it to the user to compare between the services," said Gal Arav, founder of Newsflashr.com.

Newsflashr.com also lets users search by popular topic, via a tag cloud, and sort the results by time or Alexa rank. For technology topics, Newsflashr.com provides an option to use the Techmeme Leaderboard as a set of feeds. Users can also adjust the freshness of feeds, aged from one to seven hours.

For news junkies, Newsflashr.com is a fast and convenient site for scanning headlines, but it needs a better way than Alexa to rank the popularity of the feed sources in search results. In addition, Arav's company developed Instant Bull, which provides search results for company tickers across stock message boards.

Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBS Interactive News, which includes CBSNews.com and CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan.

Topics:: Productivity and business

Tags:: Newsflashr,; news aggregation

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