Findory has an interesting approach to reading the news. When you click on a news story there, Findory remembers your interests, and the next time you come back it will attempt to personalize the news to your tastes. Read the review from SearchDay, and give it a try yourself.

The Library of Congress has expanded its online access to photographs and prints in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room. Keep in mind that not all of these photos are in the public domain, and the usual copyright protections will apply.

Google Alert, no doubt in a move triggered by the debut of Google’s own Google Web Alerts, has announced several new technologies, including SightPoint, which uses Bayesian statistics to rate new search results based on their similarity to results the user has clicked on before.

Yes, yes, yes — I am going to be posting older articles for the next few weeks while I catch up on the backload. But these links are worth the read, no matter when they were posted.

Two weeks ago Gary Price guest-hosted over at SearchDay, where he featured an interview with the CEO…

Meta-search tool SurfWax recently released its new News “Accumulator”, offering 100,000 topic specific news pages covering 4,000 news sources. SurfWax plans to begin offering News Alerts starting in June — be sure to check back.

The Social Security Administration’s Master Death File is a good source of information when trying to learn whether a person has died. It’s now available by subscription at the link above. Don’t be alarmed by the high subscription rates; you can perform an individual search for $10. (Thanks to Genie for the pointer)

Here’s another way you can make research come to you — it’s called Trackle. Once you sign up, just tell Trackle the websites you want to monitor, and whenever the content on those pages change, Trackle will send you an e-mail containing all the new content. Best of all, it’s free.

The Congressional Research Service issues over 3,000 briefs, reports, short issue papers, and longer position papers each year. Unfortunately, it does not make these documents available to the public. That hasn’t stopped congressmen and government agencies from passing them around, and about 1,000 are currently available on the web. Here’s a handy CRS search page…