Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Pressrank.com?
• Who uses Pressrank.com and why?
• How does it work?
• Why visit Pressrank.com?
• How do I use the site?
• Why can't I customize the page to show the news I'm interested in?
• Is redistribution of other sources content illegal?
• How did Pressrank.com start?
• What future improvements will be available?

Pressrank.com is a scientific venture consolidating information across various news sources as a research tool. It is not designed to be a competitive service, rather its primary purpose is to serve as a free comparative service across mainstream media. Each page or "dashboard" displays the top ten stories from top sources for that particular topic as queried from dozens of feeds for each category.

• Media: Comparative tool to assess which sources are covering which stories
• Networks: See which sources covers an event first
• Academics: Research, media analysis, topic trending
• Libraries: Periodical management and research
• Archivists: Ability to do daily data capture across multiple sources
• News Junkies: Consume information from a central location
• Regular Users: Enjoys seeing diversified coverage on key topics

Simple Answer: RSS - Really Simple Syndication

Complex Answer: XML, XSL, ASP, VB, SSI, HTML, JS, CSS

Pick the topic you are interested in Hover mouse over interested link (turns blue) If curious, read description popup (see left) Otherwise click to go directly to article

There are plenty of well designed news portals like Google and Yahoo that allow you to create user accounts and filter the news that displays on the page based on personal settings. The premise of Pressrank.com is to have a standardized visitor experience and serve as a comparative scientific tool.

No, in fact each news agency provides RSS feeds of their content for displaying on websites. However, each news institution maintains their own terms of use policy to which is required to be upheld. Pressrank.com does not give advertisement click-throughs, augment the content of feeds, or redirect the visitor to ulterior locations. It only allows visitors to directly access news and information from the source they are published on and gives credit to each news source they link to.

As a social scientific researcher I was tired of the "medium is the massage" way news is presented as well and the amount of effort required to objectively find a sampling of news across various sources. Pressrank.com is just a personal home page I started to save me from running my bookmark gauntlet. Since its deployment it has become widely utilized for its stoic way of presenting information by topic and is valuable as a comparative tool to assess what stories are being covered by news sources.

New enhancements coming soon! Never before seen tools available here in the upcoming months.