Start-up's new take on news

An Internet start-up in Bedford aims to challenge online search titan Google Inc. by changing the way people find online news.

Newsflashr.com launched in February. It's a news aggregator site with links to the latest stories from hundreds of online news sources - just like Google News and other popular headline sites.

But Newsflashr founder Gal Arav said his site gives readers something that rival sites don't - greater ease of use and a story selection process that helps readers understand how the site picks its top news items.

"I think I've got a technology here that is that much better than what exists out there," said Arav, a native of Israel who came to Massachusetts in 2000.

Arav said Google News doesn't reveal the workings of its selection algorithms. That means users can only guess why a particular story is at the top of the page. Also, when Google News lists hundreds of stories on the same event, it's unclear why a report from, say, the Times of India might be ranked higher than one from the Associated Press.

Arav said readers may suspect that editorial bias has crept into Google's system. "Who's to say big companies aren't buying their way to the top of the news page?" he said.

Newsflashr makes no secret of its method. The company gets newsfeeds from several hundred sources - newspapers, wire services, and broadcasters. It then analyzes the headlines of each story to identify keywords. The more often a keyword appears in a headline, the more significant the story. The right side of the Newsflashr page shows dozens of these keywords, in alphabetical order and in varying type sizes. The bigger the word, the more recent stories have been filed on that subject. The top of the headline listing features the five most popular keywords, enabling readers to quickly spot the hottest stories at that hour.

In addition, Newsflashr uses Alexa, an Internet service that ranks the amount of traffic received at various sites. A user can sort news stories by the Alexa rankings of the sites that published them. Sites with higher rankings have more readers, probably because they've earned a reputation as a reliable information source. "Traffic rank serves as a proxy for the credibility of a site," said Arav.

Apart from Newsflashr's story selection methods, the site promises greater ease of use. The keyword feature makes it easy to find major news stories in seconds. Newsflashr also has a preview feature that displays the first sentence or two of a news story, when the user merely moves the mouse over the story's headline.

Barry Parr, media analyst for research firm JupiterResearch LLC, said there's plenty of room in the Internet news market for an innovative new approach. "There are so many ways of using the news, that in an ideal world we're going to have lots of different ways of going about it," Parr said. But he questioned whether Newsflashr will find a mass audience, because Google News and other online news aggregators are probably good enough for most users. "Except for a handful of people, they don't necessarily care, as long as it comes from a reputable source," Parr said.

Arav said his initial goal for Newsflashr is "to get people to use it essentially as their daily newspaper." But he's also interested in partnering with existing Internet companies that might adopt his technology for their own news aggregation services.