Lana Whited at Roanoke.Com

Finding a needle in a haystack seems less like hyperbole in the age of the World Wide Web. Searching out a news article on the web can seem more like finding a needle in 3,000 haystacks. Just to cite one example, today I tried "Elian Gonzalez" in ONE search engine alone and got 3,999 hits.

If you're a news junkie like me, or just a person who likes to be informed, I've got a shortcut for you. You can spend a few minutes a day digesting the headlines and have some sense of what goes on in the world.

Several web sites serve as "aggregation" news services. They serve as spiders traversing the World Wide Web to collect top news stories. The result is more than a digest of news, as a reader can also follow links to individual stories. Here are brief descriptions of some widely used aggregates:

1stheadlines consolidates news from "more than 320 newspaper, broadcast, and online sources." The list of sources is impressive, including the expected -- ABC News, The Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek -- and the unexpected -- The Fargo (N.D.) Forum, Czech Today, and The Singapore Straits Times. The site is the best-organized of all I looked at. It includes an index of news by topic: Animals, Avalanches, Aviation, Bomb, Crime, Earthquake, Education, Environment, etc. Each topic is followed by the number of relevant stories at the time. Thursday, for example, there were 25 animal stories. This feature would be especially useful for students.

I also like it that I can search 1stheadlines by state. The Virginia papers included in the database are the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, Newport News Daily Progress, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Roanoke Times, and (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot. The site also includes a three-day weather forecast by major city.

One drawback to the page's organization is the headlines themselves, which are listed alphabetically by news source: ABC News, Australia-Melbourne Age, Bloomberg, etc. I don't find that system particularly logical. Either a topical organization or an alphabetical listing by headline would be more useful.

Another popular aggregate is moreover.com, a "web feed" with a 1,500-source base, organized into 262 fairly specific categories, such as "Consumer: women's news" and business news listed by company.

Despite moreover.com's much deeper source base, I found several limitations. Despite its numerous subcategories, at least five of its nine major divisions concern business: Consumer, Dow Jones 30, Finance, Industry, and Technology. The Internet category also seems tipped toward coverage of dotcom companies. The three other categories are General, Regional, and Sports & Culture (note that Sports & Culture consists of four true cultural categories (Arts and culture, Entertainment, Jewish news, and Religion news) and 13 sports categories, including a separate link for cricket. In short, the balance is weird; moreover looks like a site for business and sports types.

A second weakness is that moreover pages aren't printer-friendly. I tried printing several pages and finally gave up and took notes the old-fashioned way.

A weakness I found with both 1stheadlines.com and moreover.com is the lack of true searchability. Although both sites offered Search options, my trial searches yielded odd results. On moreover.com, I searched "Atlanta Braves" and got 15 hits -- all dated March 26. On 1stheadlines, the same term yielded no results. I tried the two words alone and got 15 results for "Atlanta" and none for "Braves." I broadened my search to baseball and got 11 hits. On a second test, I tried "ƒlian Gonz‡lez" and there I got over 3,000 results on both sites.

For searchability, I found Yahoo! News far superior. On the Atlanta Braves search, I got 17 hits, all game results and news items (such as injury reports) from the past few days. Yahoo! Categories appear to cover a broader range than moreover.com and are more traditionally newspaper-ish: Business, Sports, World, Entertainment, Politics, Science, Health, Crimes and Trials, Weather, etc.

Yahoo! News presents several other advantages. First, a visitor can search by either news stories or photographs. The site also includes video highlights which can be viewed as stills or, with downloadable RealPlayer software, as streaming video.

The Yahoo! site also includes two charming features. The categories include "Oddly Enough," which on Thursday contained stories with such quirky headlines as "Wife Accused of Magic Spell on Husband Wins Appeal" and "Bird's Nest Suspected in Blackout." With all the disturbing news we get every day, we need this levity. Another entertaining feature of Yahoo! News is "This day in history." Thursday was the third anniversary of Gary Kasparov's loss to the "Deep Blue" computer in the "man v. machine" chess match. "Today in history" also fills visitors in on which famous people are celebrating birthdays. Thursday was Florence Nightingale's (in 1820). Finally, Yahoo! News always includes a poll; Thursday's question concerned whether cloning should be used to preserve endangered species. Such polls really serve little purpose, but I like to give my opinion and find out what others think.

Perhaps most uniquely, Yahoo! is the only aggregate site I looked at to offer news in different languages: French, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, and Portugese. This is a great way for students of languages to practice and worth a visit for the rest of us, especially for the lovely characters on the Asian links.

The only drawback I perceived on Yahoo! News is that its database seems slimmer than either 1stheadlines or moreover. Most of the top stories I read Thursday came from the Associated Press and Reuters Wires. So perhaps visitors don't get the breadth of sources here -- but this observation is based on limited experience, and I couldn't find a source list.

Don't even have time to browse the Web? Never fear -- at least two sites will e-mail you top headlines OR news from just the categories you like.

Moreover.com promises a customizable e-mailing daily or weekly. You can choose from the 262 pre-set categories or, moreover promises, work out new ones that suit you. The site also allows businesses to send customized e-mailings. If you work in public relations for Disney, for example, you could have all the Disney news stories from the DowJones Top 30 category sent regularly to your customers.

Yahoo! also offers "News Alerts by e-mail" and even sends "Yahoo! to Go" messages to cell phones and personal desk assistants (PDAs).

I didn't personally try either of the e-mail services, but I do get headlines from roanoke.com and The New York Times online, so I can vouch for the convenience of having a news round-up delivered daily. I don't read my paper Roanoke Times promptly each day, but I do always look at the headline message. Several times, I might have missed an article which interested me if not for the e-mail.

Which aggregate site is best for you? If you're interested in business, it's moreover.com, although you''ll find yourself consulting other sources for general news. If you want general news from a broad database, try Yahoo! News or 1stheadlines. For those fun features, don't miss Yahoo!'s "Oddly Enough" category. And if you're interested in broadcast or streaming video options, you want Yahoo!

Of course, there's no rule that you have to get all your news from one source. In fact, that isn't a good idea. So you'll want to browse around these and other sites, depending on your own interests. The lists of subcategories (especially the lengthy one at moreover.com) may seem cumbersome at first, but you'll soon learn where to find what you want. Or you can have a customized list of headlines sent to you and go online to read the appealing articles.

The BEST thing about the news aggregates is that they're free, as long as you have an Internet connection. Advertisers are footing the bill for these sites, and you and I are the beneficiaries.

Aggregate sites can make searching the web for news a little less like finding a needle in a haystack, but they won't solve all your problems. You may argue that you're too busy to read an e-mail message with 12-15 headlines each day. If you can't make that much time, you need to slow down a little bit.

If you have your own favorite news aggregate site, I'd like to hear about it. E-mail me.

Finding news in the web haystack