Silobreaker is a superb news resource

It's not that often that I'll just sit and work my way through a search engine these days and go 'ohhh!' and other such expressions of surprise and delight. However when I took a look at Silobreaker that's exactly what happened. Silobreaker is a news search engine, which is a bit like saying a book contains pages. It's far more than that. Let me take you through a few of the functions.

Obviously we have our search box, and it comes up with suggestions as you type. I got as far as 'gord' and up popped Gordon Brown's name. A search then produces basic facts and figures with a link to his biography. There is a bunch of YouTube videos as well. We also have top stories, which are updated very regularly - the top story was first reported 15 hours ago and updated an hour ago. A mouseover of the title of the story provides greater information with links to other similar stories, and a link to 'entities' - other people involved in the same story.

There's an 'in focus' side box which allows you to look in more detail at any of the relevant subject areas (in this case, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Northern Rock, UK, China, and a good dozen others), and a 'Network' box that provides a graphical representation of the subject with other related areas.

There's a 'hotspots' map, and a mouse over allows you to see exactly what is going on in a particular place in relation to the subject of your search. Below that is a 'trends' box, based on all articles on Brown, Blair and Cameron. Next up is a quotes section, in this case with quotes by and about Brown. Finally there is a link to more content, broken down by news, reports, blogs, audio/video and fact sheets.

You can personalise the search engine by registering and playing around with the widgets to make your own page. Moreover, you can assist Silobreaker by identifying 'entities', such as people, companies, organizations and key phrases, which they can include in the future. A nice feature which is almost hidden, while on other search engines it's being trumpeted as their entry into  'social search'.

In short, this is a magnificent news  search engine, and has, in a stroke, just blown away the competition. I really would urge you to explore it - you *will* find useful material there. (A big thanks to AltSearchEngines for this one).