I have been watching Silobreaker ever since it launched in beta back in 2006. It was cool back then, and it's even more interesting now, in its "official" version.

In essence, the web site provides ways to monitor and search news, through a number of specific filters or across the board, and offers data visualization tools to help understand emerging trends. I have been impressed at how well Silobreaker handles multiple types of content and provides surprisingly good analysis. Note that Silobreaker focuses exclusively on current news and events. The content comes from news, blog, transcript and multimedia sources that cover everything from the latest developments in science and technology to the gaming industry and the world’s environmental hot spots.

If all you want is news filtered by general topic, just head over to any of the search engines’ news aggregation sites. What Silobreaker does is attempt to break down the virtual “silos” of information (both within organizations and simply in our personal news gathering) to enable you to get a wider perspective on current events. It accomplishes this in several ways; first, the home page contains news snippets from around the world and several data visualization tools to help you understand the latest trends. Silobreaker also offers vertical news portals for dozens of global topics, ranging from terrorism to business mergers, neuroscience and the Middle East. There are also customized pages with information on the global hot spots related to human rights issues, natural disasters, bribery, and so on. Silobreaker also organizes specialized trend analyses related to media coverage of the US elections, avian flu and other current topics.

What Silobreaker does particularly well is provide you with visual displays of information, which enable you to spot trends or relationships that might not be initially obvious. Say, for example, you want to find out about transgenic research. Start with what Silobreaker calls the “360° search”, which looks across its indexes, including fields for entities (people, companies, locations, organizations, industries and keywords), news stories, YouTube videos, blog postings and articles.

The search results page is a bit info-dense for this Baby Boomer’s eyes, but ah... the data viz tools make my heart swoon. In my transgenics search results, I have several boxed graphics showing the relative volume of articles, blog postings, and audio or video content over the past month that mentioned the word, a map of the world highlighting areas that are particular hot-spots for transgenic research, the relative frequency of various related words (in this instance, “biotechnology” and “protein”), and even several pithy quotes from retrieved articles.

Even more intriguing is the “network” grid, which maps out relationships among concepts, entities, people and locations. The grid does in fact resemble a dynamic network, with nodes representing various concepts and lines indicating when both were written about in the context of your search. Adjust the slider bars along the top and you can focus on the people, companies or concepts of most importance in your search.

For the search on transgenics, for example, I could learn that Barcelona has been a hot spot for transgenics research, that I should remember to use “plant biotechnology” as a synonym for “transgenic”, that three major players are Monsanto, GTC Biotherapeutics and Syngenta, and that both Alzheimer’s researchers and crop scientists are looking into transgenics. All this without having to open a single document; when I moused over any of the nodes in the network, I saw the context in which the node word(s) appeared in the retrieved news items. I even have a list along the side of the grid, indicating the most common names, companies, concepts and so on within the retrieved search set.

Give this news engine a try and let me know what you think.