The various free news providers that draw from many original sources –Google News or Yahoo! News– enable searches by keywords appearing at a specific url, and by keywords in news within a geographical region. The unique advantage offered by these sites is not just the ability to search many sources at once, but to do it on an ongoing basis, without having to reenter the search terms. You can add or remove your search terms at anytime; view the results at the search engine webpage, in your email or in a newsreader.

Sometimes you may want to search a personal name, company or topic limited to a geographical region. If you wanted to identify current crime blotter reports in New York newspapers your Google News or Yahoo! News search engine will formulate a request for the exact term “police reports” in the article text of New York newspapers: allintext: “police records” location:ny. Then save the search to “alerts” to receive daily updates.

If you want to search particular news sites, including ones that aren’t in the Google or Yahoo news search, go to your search engine “alerts” page. Add a search alert for “police reports” at the site, Great Neck Record, in this form:
“police report” site:http://www.antonnews.com/greatneckrecord/

Topix.net aggregates news from multiple sources, is keyword searchable, with results updated to your newsfeed reader. Limit local results to a city or zip code.

Create Google Alerts Yahoo! Alerts

Technorati Tags: local+search, news