Alchemist Hour – Cognitive News
Question & Answer:
1. How often do you crawl the news?
Our service crawls the news using a RSS feed system that
keeps the news coming through the system as soon as we
get it. At the very slowest, it is updated every hour.
2. What news sites does the Cognitive News API cover?
Our service covers over 75,000 different English news sites
and blogs. This includes major news sites such as, CNN, New
York Times, BBC.
3. Can you query the news during a specific time period? For
example, I want the news between now and 3 hours ago.
Yes. You can query the news from any arbitrary time window
within the last 60 days using UTC epoch seconds. For this
specific example, you can set the start parameter to,
start=now-3h and the end parameter to, end=now.
4. What order are the search results returned in?
The results of your query will be ranked by most recent
publication date, or by the time they came into our system (if no
publication date can be found).
5. Are there scores associated with the results that are returned? For
example, most popular articles, articles with the most clicks, etc.?
At this time, we are not able to return articles based on most
popular articles or articles with the most clicks, but we are
working with a third party vendor to provide this
functionality. That being said, scores are returned for
individual calls, such as entities and sentiment.
6. Can I set up a filter to have the news only come from certain news
sites? For example, restrict news from only New York Times and
CNN?
Yes. Use the enrich.url.url field. For example, to pull news
articles from only NYT and CNN: q.enrich.url.url=O[cnn^nytimes]
7. Are you authorized to use all the articles the News API crawls and
returns?
Yes. Our system only uses publicly available news articles
and will not crawl any private data. Additionally, we only return a
2-sentence snippet of each article, along with the URL that links
directly back to the full article. This ensures that the original
publisher gets the clicks and credit for the content.
8. Can I add my own domain?
At this time, our system does not support this function.
However, we are exploring ways for you to bring your own
data into our system.
9. Is it possible to query the news by language? For example, only
French news or German news?
At the moment, our system will only return English-language
news. However, if you know of a French publisher that
publishes news in English, you can limit the query by that
news domain. Another option is to use the location entities
to limit news about certain regions.
10. Can you give examples of how I would use this on the front end?
What is the business value?
There are many unique ways to utilize this API, and we
continue to see new use cases on a weekly basis. One of the most
popular is financial news monitoring. Given the frequency with
which important news surfaces in the finance industry, some of our
customers have used the News API to monitor and receive alerts
about certain companies and/or acquisitions. For example, you
could monitor the sentiment, both positive and negative, of the
news on Bank of America. Similarly, it is a great way to monitor
your own brand and receive up-to-date insight on the public
opinion of your enterprise. For more use cases, check out these
stories on the AlchemyAPI blog and the Watson blog.
11. How is the News API different from Google Alerts on news topics?
Unlike a traditional Google search or alerts service, we
provide fully, pre-enriched articles, which allow you to find things
such as sentiment related to a specific topic. Our engineer, Pawan,
showed us how to use the knowledge graph to learn more about
entities or keywords mentioned. We provide structure to the
knowledge from articles that you do not get from a Google search.