ReadWriteWeb

Want to track a hot story being covered by multiple news outlets? Today Google News added the ability to pin hot stories to a special "starred" page where you can go back and find the latest updates at any time. It's a simple but elegant feature that makes the service a lot more interactive and useful.

Stories on the front page can be starred as well as story clusters that appear in search results. The resulting page of starred stories becomes a fully customized news tracker. There are plenty of other features that could be added, but this is a great start.

Most text excerpts that appear on search results pages aren't very useful. Imagine if instead your search engine showed a list of clear sentences summarizing the contents of each link on that search result page. That's what a new service called Factery Labs aims to provide for any service that utilizes the API it's launching today.

You give Factery a list of links and a keyword and it will build an index of all the facts asserted in those links about your topic of interest, delivered in XML or JSON format. The service can run on top of a search engine but could also be used in any number of other ways. I've been feeling unsatisfied with other search engines all day since seeing a Factery demo Monday morning.