NewsBank Enhancements

NewsBank is pleased to announce the launch of a new search engine that will significantly improve the speed, functionality and effectiveness of searches across its news archives. Several new, advanced features and enhancements will provide immediate benefits to students, including:

· Faster searches. The speed of searches has been vastly improved. Searches return results in seconds, regardless of the number of publications being searched, the number of articles retrieved or the complexity of the search.

· Better relevance rankings. The new search engine does a superior job of putting "best matches first" based on the search criteria, so students are more likely to find relevant articles.

· Unlimited search results. Searches will now return the total number of articles that match the search criteria-rather than a number reflecting "at least this many" hits, which was available previously. This is important to power searchers, who may need to find every reference to a person, company or topic in the news.

· "Oldest matches first" option. Students now have the option to view search results in the order of oldest to newest (according to publication date), enabling them to effectively research events or topics that follow a specific timeline.

· Inclusion of "stopwords." To improve speed, most search engines remove very common words, or "stopwords," from searches, including "the," "a" and "to." NewsBank's new search engine includes stopwords for greater precision, without impacting speed. For the phrase "the number of," search engines that remove stopwords retrieve results based only on the word "number," since "the" and "of" are removed. NewsBank's new search engine retrieves articles with the exact phrase "the number of," which are likely to include valuable statistical references.

· Smarter stemming. The automatic inclusion of the plural forms of words in searches-or "stemming"-is one way search engines ensure that students retrieve all the articles they are looking for. NewsBank's new search engine does a better job of including the plural forms of words, resulting in fewer "false hits."

NewsBank's new search engine went "live" last night, August 31, 2005, for Access World News and America's Newspapers. No action is required on your part. You will find the implementation and transition seamless.

NewsBank strives to provide market-leading products, the best customer service and user satisfaction. NewsBank's implementation of this new search engine is one of several ongoing initiatives designed to achieve these goals. Should you have any questions or comments regarding NewsBank's products and services, or the implementation of this new search engine and the value it will bring to your library, please contact NewsBank by calling 800.243.7694 or emailing customerservice@newsbank.com.

Thank you for your time and attention and for your continued use of NewsBank's products and services.

Sincerely,

The NewsBank Customer Services Team