Open Sources

Link: http://iresearch-reporter.com/

I stumbled across a remarkable online data mining and aggregation tool today.

My discovery came as I searched for a copy of an internal document circulated to diplomats in the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade – “Torture Awareness Workshop Reference Materials” – which listed both the United States and Israel as states that employ interrogation methods amounting to torture, and where prisoners risk being tortured.

A Google Alert I’d set up to capture stories related to the keywords “torture flights” tipped me off to the UPI story, called “Canada recalls torture manual.” The brief article led with “Canada’s government has ordered a manual defining torture rewritten because it included U.S.-run and Israeli sites as possible torture locations.”

Well, that’s stickin’ up for the little (tortured) guy! Way to go, Canada! Tony Blair’s got nothin’ on you for caving in to US and Israeli political pressure. One wonders when the rest of the world is going to stop putting up with the United States’ torturing and war-mongering shenanigans. God knows many of us here in the good ol’ US of A are surely sick of it, and lose sleep nightly trying to figure out a way to put a stop to such evil nonsense. Well, enough of my little rant…

I was not immediately successful in finding a copy of the Canadian “torture manual,” but did come across this interesting little gem: iResearch Reporter from Power Text Solutions. I noticed a link to these sites at the bottom of one of the web pages I dug up as I searched for the Canadian torture document listing the US and Israel.

Impressed by the information displayed on the recent-world-news.com web page, I thought I should check out the iResearch-Reporter.com utility for myself. Here are some screen shots of my experience running this search query: torture watch list.

Main Screen
Type your search query into the text box, just as you would with any regular search engine.

Summary Screen
Your search results are displayed underneath headings like “Key Topics,” “Possibly Useful,” and “Selected Sources,” which might be collapsed when the initial summary screen first appears.

Results Screen
The handful of test queries I submitted seemed to yield news articles commingled with blog posts, and even comments to blog posts. Each snippet came with a link to source material. The way these snippets were displayed made it relatively easy to scan the news and commentary results, and the links to the source material made it easy to follow up on any particular story.

So what’s the difference between conducting a Google News query and one using the iResearch-Reporter tool? From what I can tell so far, the iResearch-Reporter engine seems to pull in content from a variety of news sources, as well as from other material around the web. Mashing the snippets together, along with links to source material, made for quick and easy scanning. I’d certainly like to try the full version of this code and experiment with any auto-publishing features it might have.