What exactly is Topix?
Topix.net is a news aggregator, with 300,000 categorized headline news channels collected from over 10,000 sources -- the only site to provide ZIP code level local news for every town in the US and Canada, as well as news about every public company, health issue, sports team, celebrity and thousands of other topics. In addition, Topix.net provides news search. Both the categorized news channels and search results are available via the Topix.net site, as well as via RSS.
Topix has thousands of pages dedicated to different topics. How do you sort all that information?
Topix.net's NewsRank(tm) technology, and the various underlying systems enable Topix.net to crawl, categorize and serve news about 300,000 different topics through advanced AI algorithms which distill relevance based on concept, rather than keyword -- establishing whether a story is truly *about* a subject, or merely mentions it, how important that story is relative to other stories. The heart of Topix.net's technology is, in fact, the ability to categorize and rank news stories, instead of merely serving up keyword search results.
Tell us what Topix is doing in the area of local search.
At Topix.net, we empower people to discover news about their community at a very local level, enabling them to discover things about where they live, work or travel to, in a way they wouldn't be able to do with a traditional "search" paradigm. Once we have information about the locality, we layer in content and advertising that's *extremely* relevant -- events, sports, business on the news side, and services and products from local providers on the ad side.
What does Topix offer users that they can't get, say from Google News or Yahoo News or CNN?
Topix.net is the only service where a user can find truly local news-- about where they live, work, or travel to -- instead of state or metro level news. Also, fine grained relevant news about 300k topics from Autos, to the search engine industry, to blogging, to health issues-- all are separated out into categorized news. Just try to find breaking news about "search engines" on a search engine...Also,Topix.net provides a greater variety of sources than any other major news site, giving a greater breadth to the news experience each user has, as well.
What news sources does Topix grab content from? TV, radio, print,etc.?
All of them. Really. We have over 10,000 news sources, with more being added all the time from newspaper, TV, radio, blog sources, BtoB publications, lifestyle magazines, government sources like police blotters and Coast Guard reports, as well as college and alternative publications.
Are there plans to add a video or audio Topix search (maybe even podcast)?
We have done some preliminary work with Video news sources, and are looking at integrating podcasts from webmasterradio.fm, amongst other things. It's not front and center on our road map to expand these efforts at the moment, but as we ramped up our RSS content in response to user demand, we're keeping an eye on this.
Let's talk about RSS feeds. Do you offer feeds for every single page of News that you cover?
Yes -- users can access every single one of our headline news channels as well as search results via an RSS feed.
Do you accept news submissions, i.e., a small town newspaper would like its content to be picked up by you, etc.?
We love source submissions! We've added over 6,000 sources, many of whom had contacted us to be added into our crawl. Driving traffic to publishers is an obvious win-win for us, the user and the publisher.
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