For my readers in the U.S. I'd like to call attention to a search engine that I've just learned about. It's been around for two years, but then I'm a little slow out of the starting gate.

According to Fred Barnako's Internet Daily e-newsletter,

Topix.net scours 150,000 Web news sources every 30 minutes. By entering a zip code, city name, keyword, or topic, you receive citations tailored to your interest. This means that if you're into celebrities, there are 50,000 pages for 50,000 stars. If you live in Great Falls, Virginia, one Topix page will give you pertinent stories from a dozen local and national newspapers, Web logs, and Web sites.

"Try doing a news search on your home town in Google News. It's pretty tough," Skrenta said. "But we can bring it down to a four-block-square area, because we have 30 thousand feeds, for every city and town in the U.S. and for every country, too."

Speaking personally, I tend to be more aware of what is going on in Singapore than what is happening down the street. This is just not right, and with Topix maybe I can mend the error of my ways. Now, if they could just tell me what it all means ...

Topix.net has just turned profitable and gone into an alliance with the NY Times, so it should be around for a while until it gets snapped up by Google or whomever.