All the News That's Fit to Search

June 2, 2010 2:50 PM

Busk is a search engine dedicated to items which are in the news. It gathers the results from thousands of sites and many of them contain full content including pictures, videos, and podcasts.

You can choose between a few different languages at the top of the page. Once a search is displayed, you can choose to expand all, or filter your results. The bottom of each result you click will have an area which allows you to favourite, share, and read the entire article on the original site.

posted by gman (15 comments total)

The interface is nicely designed. The responses make sense. This is no Cuil. Busk may be onto something. That is all.

(Now I will wait five minutes for someone to search something and express snark at the result.)
posted by chavenet at 3:01 PM on June 2, 2010

Could someone please forward this to Rupert Murdoch and then video his reaction? Thanks.
posted by afx237vi at 3:10 PM on June 2, 2010

ooooh shiny.
posted by WASP-12b at 3:12 PM on June 2, 2010

So this algorithm stakes out a corner and asks everyone who passes by your query?
posted by Babblesort at 3:26 PM on June 2, 2010

The filter is half in English, half in Portuguese. Also, what is "Akan" (under English in the language filter)? screenshot (sorry, chavenet)
posted by desjardins at 3:40 PM on June 2, 2010

Everyone knows that Akan is a group of languages spoken mainly by people in Western Africa.
posted by gman at 3:47 PM on June 2, 2010

Go busk akan!

FWIW "busk" has to be from the Portuguese buscar, to search, to fetch. (And also Spanish buscar, same thing.)
posted by chavenet at 4:01 PM on June 2, 2010

So you're saying it's not from 1857 busk (v.) "to offer goods for sale only in bars and taprooms," 1851 (in Mayhew), perhaps from busk "to cruise as a pirate," which was used in a figurative sense by 1841, in reference to people living shiftless and peripatetic lives? The nautical term is attested from 1660s (in a general sense of "to tack, to beat to windward"), apparently from obs. Fr. busquer "to shift, filch, prowl," which is related to It. buscare "to filch, prowl," Sp. buscar (from O.Sp. boscar), perhaps originally from bosco "wood" (see bush), with a hunting notion of "beating a wood" to flush game.
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:18 PM on June 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

I asked for Space - I got Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy which led to Blackhawks' fans like team logo merchandise.
posted by Cranberry at 4:21 PM on June 2, 2010

It has a nice design, but I don't find this all that exciting. It doesn't seem to be doing much to surface the more interesting articles from the less interesting.
posted by delmoi at 5:13 PM on June 2, 2010

I entered the name of my little town and the first (most recent) entry was a very California-esque "View from Your Window" on Andrew Sullivan's blog, then a Luxist story about a local winery in financial trouble (the wine 'industry' here is healthy; this vintner got overextended buying other wineries, mostly out of state), a HuffPo piece on the CalPERS state retirement fund with a snarky comment from a local Republican politician, items about MGMT starting their tour here last week, articles referencing our claim-to-fame as the first city to ban smoking in indoor public places (in 1990), a survey on Polluted Places which we landed in because one corner of the county peeks into the ecologically disastrous San Joaquin Valley, and, HEY, there's the MeFi post about the Writing in Public event, credited to "filthy light thief, MetaFilter".

Good sign that it's crediting MetaFilter posters that way, but no sign of any of our "local" news sources, not even the NBC affiliate whose news gets repurposed at MSNBC.com...
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:14 PM on June 2, 2010

After a search on 'neutrino' it appeared to be searching by keyword rather than subject. (Formula One racing and South Pole expeditions not what I had in mind.)

Limited usefulness for common words then. I'm thinking news orgs should be interested in tagging their stories.
posted by Twang at 5:41 PM on June 2, 2010

crashed. next.
posted by jcworth at 6:24 PM on June 2, 2010

About Akan:

For some reason Busk misidentifies some English language articles as Akan (an African language).

Akan is a common word in Indonesian. It means "towards" and is also used as a tense marker, like "going to" in English. Searching for "akan" mostly pulls up random articles in Indonesian, plus a few articles that mention the Akan language.

So, yeah, it has a few glitches.
posted by nangar at 8:30 PM on June 2, 2010

I tried a search for Estulin, a conspiracy theorist who Lega nord invited into the European Parliament. There are a few results for it, mainly because most hacks left the room stifling laughter, but Busk found only one, and that was a dead end and missed the few actual stories.

What does it do better than Google News?
posted by quarsan at 9:37 PM on June 2, 2010