Just to qualify a couple of things I said on Monday.

I should have said that my distrust of timeliness in Google is based primarily on experiences with Google Scholar, and to a lesser extent with older (ie not breaking news) content on Google.

I imagine that news- and blog-based content (which often includes metadata which states at what date/time a news article was published online) will probably be more reliable in any search engine, than the often much older content featured in in any search platform (this is important in Google Scholar especially because relying on references older than 10 years old is a major no-no in some social sciences).

Secondly, RE: caching, I have just discovered (contrary to some research I did last year, and what I said on Monday) that apparently some content in The Daily Express IS available via Google’s and Yahoo’s cache option. Which came as a bit of a surprise, I must say!

RE: the new options in Google – I’ve experimented with a couple of these options before while they were available in Beta in Google Labs with some great results (the timelines especially caught my eye) and I’ve tried a couple of things that threw up some interesting things tonight.

The first thing I would say is,that timeliness in some of these new options is not universal. It doesn’t seem possible, for example, to switch between sorting Video results by relevence and by timeliness – a serious problem for any BJ looking to see what the competition are broadcasting throughout the day.

If you run a search on any term, and then select the Video option you (obviously) get videos from around the web which fit the bill. If however, you then select the ‘sort by date option’ while looking at these results, you are basically turfed out of Video results, and back to general results.

It is possible to see on Truveo what is going on in breaking news terms (albeit it only allows a general overview of what’s being broadcast – you can’t search) using a specific function – and that’s something that Google should definately be looking at:
http://slewfootsnoop.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/truveo-browse-breaking-uk-tv-news-in-one-place/

In relation to the Forums option, I would strongly suggest UK journalists combine an advanced search with their searches here.

If, for example, you run a search on expenses and select the Forums option, you get a wide spread of results, some of which include international comment (which is fair enough – not all UK commenters comment on UK-domained forums, and likewise there are forums which deal in UK issues which are not UK-domained).

However, to be on the safe side, it’s a good idea to go into the Advanced Google search and select United Kingodom from the Region option, then run the search again.

BTW – RE: Scoopler, I have to say I share your enthusiam for this engine early on – it looks great, and I’m going to look at it in more detail in the coming days.