Frequently Asked Questions

Wotnews is a search engine that focuses on Australian business news. We monitor, index, organise and analyse business news - Australian business news. In fact, after less than two years of operation, we're perhaps already the best source of Australian business news on the web. If not, then we soon will be.

Wotnews enables you to:

• Read the latest and most reported Australian business stories as they break.
• Monitor the biggest news makers - which companies are most mentioned? Which business leaders and politicians are dominating the media?
• Stay on top of the big issues in your industry.
• Monitor news about your own company or investments - your customers, clients, prospects, competitors and so on.

The service is totally free. You don't even have to sign in or register.

You can register and create an account with Wotnews and:

• Create your own profile so you can focus exclusively on the news you're interested in.
• Receive a daily news report by email featuring the top stories across the topics, industries, people, companies and industries you're monitoring.
• Publish your own organisation's news through Wotnews and to the world.
• Save your favourite articles.
• And more..

Wotnews is free so why not register now.

Wotnews is designed for people who wants to search and monitor the news, analyse trends and movements over time and keep on top of events as they happen.

• PR professionals monitoring news about a particular client company and interested in the frequency, reach and volume of stories about the client as well as the variety of news sources from traditional news networks through to alternative online media sources.
• Share Traders tracking business news across a portfolio of investments.
• Sales Professionals managing a long term sales process with a strategic customer.
• Government policy professionals monitoring specific business and community issues.

Yes. Wotnews is a great tool for publishing your own news beyond your traditional audience. Simply add news@wotnews.com.au to your email newsletter distribution list. It's that simple. You can also use this feature to monitor customer and competitor news anonymously (and avoid alerting them to the fact that you're on their mailing list!).

New articles are manually approved by our administrators within hours of submission. You will be sent an email advising you when your article has been reviewed and approved. If you don't hear from us perhaps something went wrong, in which case please email us at feedback@wotnews.com.au.

We focus on Australian business news. We search and index more local Australian sources.

Larger search engines try to index and aggregate everything and as a result Australian business news content often gets lost in the noise.

News sites, by definition, usually voice one perspective.

Wotnews aggregates and organises business news from hundreds of different sources so you get the whole story across every perspective, in one place.

But Wotnews doesn't just return a list of articles, it automatically organises news by company, people and themes to make it a lot easier to discover who is working with whom, who the market leaders are, where the market's going and where potential sales might come from. Better still, with a Wotnews account all this happens in relation to your own profile.

Wotnews is also smart enough to provide a level of analysis across this aggregated news data. So for example, Wotnews can rate and graph who and what are getting the most mentions in the news at any given time and show how these rankings shift over the course of the day.

Wotnews finds Australian business news in three ways:

• Wotnews consumes hundreds of RSS feeds from Australia's leading business news sites and blogs.
• Wotnews saves thousands of business email newsletters sent every day from Australian companies - big and small. news@wotnews.com.au is signed up to the email newsletters of all the major Australian companies (and growing) so you can search them all without cluttering your inbox.
• Our custom-built news spider travels the web indexing any Australian business news it finds.

Email newsletters are a largely 'hidden' source of news. If you aren't on the subscriber list you won't know what's in them and you won't know if your company is explicitly mentioned. As most aren't published to the web, they aren't even found by the search engines. Add to this, there's simply too many to subscribe to individually. (And do you really want to alert your competitors to the fact that you're on their mailing list?).

Let Wotnews do the work. We're already signed up to the email newsletters of all the major Australian companies, so now you don't need to spend hours managing your subscriptions and the subsequent email flow.

By the way, if there is a business email newsletter you think we aren't indexing, just subscribe to it with our email address instead of yours (news@wotnews.com.au) and we'll start indexing and analysing the emails as though they were any other news source. It's that simple.

As news hits the Wotnews website it is analysed using a combination of techniques - Bayesian, instance-based learning, natural language and semantic processing, key word tagging and Boolean filtering to name a few - to identity the people, companies, themes, locations, products (and more) mentioned in articles. This data is then aggregated and organised enabling Wotnews users to easily find relevant news and uncover relationships between elements mentioned - related companies, related people, etc.

With a huge data set of Australian business news to draw upon, Wotnews can identify the most commonly occurring elements in the news over a period of time or at a given point. With some nifty interface features like tag clouds, timelines and graphing tools you're well equipped to discover who or what is getting the largest share of the news you're interested in.

Yes. Register for a Wotnews account and you can define and manage the news you're interested in. Once your industry, competitors and customers are detailed in your profile, Wotnews can filter and display your personalised business news instantly each time you visit the site.

Your news profile is also used to personalise your Wotnews daily email news report - sent direct to your inbox each morning, saving you hours of searching every day.

Yes. The easiest way to do this is by setting up a profile in a Wotnews account. You can then identify individual people, companies and news sources you no longer wish to monitor.

Wotnews is free so why not register now.

Yes. Personalised Australian business news sent direct to your inbox each morning is at the core of the Wotnews service. Think of it as a personal news clipping service that highlights news about your competitors, your customers and industry. Even potential sales opportunities - exactly as you've asked for it in your Wotnews profile, saving you hours of searching every day. You'll soon wonder how you could work without it!.

Yes. Wotnews assigns a popularity score to articles based on a number of factors, including how many times an article summary has been viewed, clicked on, emailed, or saved to a user's profile. Wotnews uses this aggregate number to compare the popularity of one news article to another. The higher the number, the more popular the article is.

The Wotnews team is working hard to create better tools for you to analyse and visualise news data. Right now the site offers:

• Bar and column graphs representing current media share (share of voice) for a company, person, topic or source, within a chosen theme.
• Timeline view showing the date and time that articles relevant to your search were published.
• Cloud view to help you spot strong and weak associations.

The cloud view is an alternative way of visually showing people, topics, companies, etc related to your search theme. You'll find a navigation tab called 'Clouds' at the top any search results page. Clicking this tab will take you to a page full of words. Themes that are currently occurring more frequently in the news or are more strongly associated with your search theme, will be depicted in larger type.

The Wotnews website as well as Wotnews (the registered version that gives you profiling, customised analysis and daily email reporting) are both totally free.

Some specialised versions of Wotnews, tailored to particular industry segments, are coming soon. There will be a fee for use, though at a price you'll find pleasantly surprising if you've used any paid media analysis service before.

Providing your email address is not a spam risk. Above all, we respect your privacy. We guarantee we will never ever give, sell or trade your address to any other organisation.

The only emails you will ever receive from us are:

• Your personalised daily email news report
• An initial verification email to activate your account
• Password reminders upon request
• Occasionally we ask our users for input and feedback on our service to help us make improvements
• Updates about improvements to our service
• If you send us a question by email and would like to hear back from us

Wotnews is designed, developed and managed in Australia by a team with many years of experience in market research, advertising, marketing, journalism, web technology, and cutting edge programming.

Some of our team are ex-marketing professionals (should we admit this??!!! Well... I guess we just did... ), who've used the web for years for secondary market research. Understanding a market, working on positioning, finding leads etc. While generic search engines are great for background and depth, nothing beats business news sites and blogs for the best source of what is happening in the market right now.

The trouble is it takes hours to sift through all the dross to find all the good bits. Typically it would take several weeks of searching before really understanding the state of play in order to give meaningful insight into the best way forward.

We decided to build our own business news site that does a lot of the work for us. A site that automatically organises news by company, people and themes to make it a lot easier to discover who is working with who, who are the market leaders, where is the market going, what are the important themes, and ultimately where potential sales might come from.

If you've got ideas or feedback, or if you've found (gulp!!) a bug, we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at feedback@wotnews.com.au.

To arrange for your account to be deleted contact Wotnews at support@wotnews.com.au. You'll need to email us from the email address you used to create your Wotnews account so if you're now using a different email address you should update your details in the edit profile section. Please keep in mind that once we've deleted your account we can't retrieve it so if you want to start using Wotnews again you'll need to create a new account.