Topix.net Unveils Biggest News Index on the Internet; Interactive Click-O-Gram Adds Story Popularity, and Extends Results to One Year

Business Wire, August 8, 2006

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Topix.net, an Internet news site providing local news for the world, today sets the bar for news search on the Internet with the release of its latest News Search Product. Topix.net now adds visualization on top of the Internet's biggest news index, providing over one year of news results on every search, compiled from over 50,000 main stream news sources as well as blogs. In addition, Topix.net is now the only news search site to enable case sensitive search. Extending news search through visualization of one year's worth of news stories augments Topix.net's local news for 50,000 cities and towns worldwide, enabling people to delve more deeply into the stories and topics of interest to them where they work, live or travel.

With this announcement, Topix.net becomes the first Internet news aggregator to extend its search past 45 days for every result, and provides nearly ten times the results of most other news sites on the Internet. Further, Topix.net is also the only news site to provide visualization for one year of results, through an interactive click-o-gram of the search term's popularity in the news extending back throughout that entire year. This enables users to not only see the relative popularity of a search term over time, but also easily navigate from up-to-the-minute results back to headlines published throughout the previous year.

"We are very excited to be setting a new standard for news search on the web and giving people a way to visualize a year's worth of stories," said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix.net. "Localization, the biggest index, and the most sources make Topix.net the best news search site on the net."

For power users, Topix.net is also providing the web's only case sensitive search ability. The case sensitive search on Topix.net's News Search Product, combined with a year of search results and visualization, makes searching for news on terms like "IT" much easier. Prior functionality from the existing Topix.net Search Product has also been maintained, including matching topics, the ability to segregate news and blogs in the results and time stamps of publication dates of the results.

About Topix.net

Providing local news to the world, Topix.net was founded in 2002 with the specific mission of providing users with the ability to quickly and easily find targeted news on the Internet. A news aggregator with unique technology to find and categorize news into 360,000 topics, from Autos to ZIP code level local news, Topix.net is a privately held company with investment from Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI), McClatchy Company, Inc. (NYSE:MNI) and Tribune Company (NYSE:TRB). Topix.net distributes content via partnerships with top tier web properties including AOL, Earthlink, Ask, My Yahoo, Infospace and thousands of others.