Mercury Center: NewsHound

Tony Pompili

Here's a dog that's really paper-trained," boasts Mercury Center about its customizable news service. NewsHound combines strong customization with a low price ($4.95 per month for 5 profiles). It sniffs out about 2,000 articles daily from sources such as AP, Business Wire, and over 60 newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and, of course, its home base, The San Jose Mercury News. Like Farcast, the service uses Internet e-mail both to deliver your custom news and to set up daily queries.

NewsHound is one of the lowest-priced services of our test group. The monthly charge brings you five news profiles and unlimited full-text retrieval. You can obtain NewsHound through America Online by entering the keyword "newshound."

NewsHound's Profiles are custom search queries that define your topics. NewsHound uses the Profile to search through the nearly 2,000 new articles it gets a day to extract only those that meet the search criteria. You can either use your stored Profile queries or perform ad hoc searches.

You create, modify, or remove News-Hound Profiles by sending a properly formatted e-mail message. NewsHound does not use Boolean terms; it claims that you'll get better results with its system of specifying "possible," "required," and "excluded" terms. We found that this query system did a good job of eliminating irrelevant articles, though we're not convinced that there's nothing Boolean about it.

In testing, NewsHound delivered an impressive array of pertinent articles, but it took a bit of tweaking to fine-tune our results. Articles are delivered in full text, and each one appears in a separate e-mail message with the headline as the subject. You have to open the article to see which Profile gleaned it for you though; we would have preferred the Profile name in the subject line.

Solid news, full-text articles and low cost make this NewsHound a prime contender among the services we evaluated. While not everyone will be comfortable with its e-mail-based Profile configuration, the results are worth any hassles.

NewsHound. List price: $4.95 per month for five profiles. Mercury Center, San Jose, CA; 800-818-6397, 408-297-8495; fax, 408-271-3718; http://www.sjmercury.com/ hound.

Suitability to Task

NewsHound

Ease of setup        Good
Customizability      Excellent
Quality of delivery  Excellent

Topic Strength

U.S. news            ***
World news           ***
Business             ***
Sports               ***
Arts & entertainment ***
Technology           ***

Copyright (c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company