Iria

News enthusiasts, rejoice. A Web site is being introduced Monday that will not only let you find articles on the topic of your choice from hundreds of newspapers and magazines, it will also alert you to all the other news accounts floating around cyberspace that have any connection whatsoever to anything you read.

The site, Inform.com, developed by Inform Technologies, a New York start-up, will perform information-delivery feats that its founders claim no other Web site can match. The question is whether the average reader will want to follow the spectacle.

At first glance, Inform.com resembles so-called news-reader services like Yahoo News and Google News, which can be customized to hunt down stories related to, say, technology or entertainment.

But Inform goes further, scanning every news article from hundreds of well-known publications (and some blogs), then creating an index of important elements in the article. So as a user reads a WashingtonPost.com article about Sandra Day O'Connor, for example, Inform offers a short list of related stories about the justice and other people, places, organizations, topics, industries and products mentioned in the text.

The article appears as it would on the newspaper's site --with The Post's advertisements--while the Inform links appear in a border.
If readers choose not to dig into Supreme Court-related issues, they can search another topic, browse a directory of hundreds of news categories or read articles on a list of "hot" people and organizations, ranked according to how many times they are mentioned in Inform's article database.

If that sounds like a trick the search engines could just as easily pull off, it's not that simple. While Google News, for instance, will retrieve articles about IBM, it will miss other items referring to the company as I.B.M., or International Business Machines. Inform's system has been programmed to look for those variations even as it searches for the specified term.
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Read More / Source: News.com