(http://nt.excite.com/, Spring, 1997)
Overall, highly recommended. It is essentially free - you can get by without paying for articles - and I'd give NewsTracker an A for content related to our course and a C- for speed of access. The interface otherwise is fine. So give it a try.
Details-
I spent several hours with NewsTracker one weekend. I made up a custom news page (all free by the way unless you really need an article from NY Times or some source which forces you to pay as well as register to see the article ) for Future Trends. The results were very good. (Click here to see Newstracker Sources.)
Some of the key words which I used were <future trends futurist prediction forecast environment technology social political economic cultural> If you throw in words like pollution, crime, etc you will get more sources. It is probably better because you can have 20 topics in you Custom news folio, to have separate searches for the different subtopics.
At any rate, excite which runs the site either is very busy or has a very slow interface. I think both. Although the pages are saved in cache on my machine, they still load very slowly which leads me to believe that the interface is very inefficient.
I normally have graphics off, but do get all the graphics on the Newstracker home page and the custom news page which lists the articles you found. That should speed things up a little.
I grab the article, it loads up in my computer's cache (in Netscapes preferences folder in my system folder so you will have to find it in your Windoze systems). I scan the article for interesting links before going back to the Customs News page with my search results. I do not read the article or print it out on line - that comes after the session.
At any rate, every time I return to the Custom News page it takes as long as the first time the custom news page was created. Default is 25 articles. I increased that to 50 for one search, but each time I grabbed an article, it would take another 60+ seconds to get back to the custom news page. So I think more frequent searches, continually tailoring them, may be better.
Get it a try.
Useful URLs / Links | NewsTracker Sources
Resume:- Library Supplement page
Revised 13 December 1998