Excite News Search Review

by Greg R.

Excite News Search RIP.
Excite no longer maintains a separate news search engine or its NewsTracker alert service. With the bankruptcy of Excite@Home, Excite.com was sold to InfoSpace. The News search now uses the InfoSpace Dogpile meta news search.

This review will continue to be available to provide an historical record of the news search capabilities and database Excite used to have.

A direct URL of news.excite.com provides easy and direct access to using Excite's News Search for their newswires, Web news, and news pictures. Only one of the three options can be searched at a time. As of Nov. 2001, only news and photo options are available, and the NewsTracker current awareness tool is defunct.

Dates: Coverage is current with some sources available for several months.
Sources: More than 350 Web-accessible newspapers, news sites, and online magazines. (However, this list is several years old and does not appear to have been updated.)
Sort: Relevance; publication and date sorts available for 40 hits
Frequency: According to their documentation, all sites are indexed four times a day
Case Recognition: None
Stop Words: Yes, including: the, a, of
Truncation: No truncation capabilities are available.
Boolean: Full Boolean supported with nesting, but operators must be UPPER CASE. Excite also supports the + - system.
Phrase: Phrase searching can be designated by double quotes "" around a search phrase.