Renaissance Faires and Air Bag Safety
© Roxianne Moore
Depending on the type of writing you do, you'll either lean heavily on news services, or you'll use them once in a blue moon.
In my case, as a writer for Renaissance magazine, I rarely need the latest news for my articles. However, I thought I'd give them a try for a piece on Renaissance Faire vendors. My first stop was Excite's news search engine. I didn't get a single hit that bore any resemblance to my query.
In Infoseek's Business News section, I tried the queries, "Are Renaissance Fairs good business?" and "Do Renaissance Fairs make money?" The answers I got ranged from "Vietnam reports progress in sea talks with China," to "Small Businesses can get capital with good business plan." Although I got 100 hits, I didn't see any that related to Renaissance Fairs. I did get Renaissance Capital Growth and Income Fund and Swine Online, a 'must see' attraction at Microsoft State Fair.
Using Search Engines yielded better results, though I didn't find much in the way of news. With Alta Vista, I found plenty of links to web sites, but very little hot news. I did reach the Renaissance Faire News, which has news Yahoo! also yielded a number of Faire-related web sites, but no news. Since Yahoo! is a web guide rather than a true search engine, I wasn't really surprised by these results, but I was disappointed.
Web Crawler yielded still more web sites, including a lot of doubles and triples. Weeding through them proved to be more tiresome than the others.
Still, if you're in a different field, new search services can be very useful. I've had better luck looking for news about air bag safety for pregnant women.
I got ten hits on Excite, all links to Web sites. A news search on Excite yielded no hits. Although a Lycos search yielded thousands of hits, they were all old. News releases were dated as far back as 1995, and not one was from 1997.
The best results I got were from Yahoo!, although I had to search through several pages (out of more than 6,000 hits) to find the actual news releases. All of the hits were on the Alta Vista system, but since Yahoo! searches both databases simultaneously, you don't need to do two separate queries. Although I had a lot of weeding to do, I did find several articles and web sites that provided the information I needed.
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