1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information retrieval systems and, more particularly, to systems and methods for providing alerts regarding relevant news articles.
2. Description of Related Art
To keep abreast of recent events, people read newspapers, watch TV, and visit web sites. These methods, however, require users to go looking for news and not the other way around. Recently, a number of services have offered users the ability to have news articles sent to them. For example, a news provider, such as CNN, currently allows users to be notified about breaking news headlines by sending them a message via e-mail or by telephone.
Services like these remain relatively unsophisticated. One major challenge is making sure that breaking news is sent only to the people who really care about the topic of the breaking news. To address this issue, some services offer different channels, such as a breaking news channel, a sports channel, a finance channel, and channels relating to other pre-selected topics.
These types of services typically are not adequate enough, however, to serve the users' needs. For example, some people prefer to describe in their own words what articles they are interested in seeing. This is not currently possible because past systems have been limited to providing general breaking news alerts or alerts related merely to a predefined set of broad topics. Also, some people would only like to know about the most relevant articles matching their interests. Furthermore, some people would like to be made aware of all of the coverage about a topic not just news articles from one news source (or a small number of news sources). In addition, some people would like to be made aware of relevant articles when it is convenient for them, not when it is convenient for the service providing the articles.
Therefore, there exists a need for a mechanism that provides users with recent news articles that are relevant to the interests of the users and that are derived from a large number of news sources and permits users to control the time of when they are notified of the news articles.