Meta-Press.es

Decentralized search engine & automatized press reviews

A propos

lang.: fr

Table of Contents

1. What is it?
- 1.1. Limits
2. How does it work?
3. Who’s doing it?
4. You can support this work

1. What is it?

Meta-Press.es is a tool to search the online press (international reference press, specialized reviews, general purpose press…). It can be used to make press reviews for big associations for instance or scientific press coverage (via dedicated sources). Researches are keyword driven and you can select precisely in which sources to search (via type, language, theme, result type…). So users have full control over the sources queried to perform their searches and they even can add their own sources.

Then it’s possible to schedule daily searches (or monthly ones).

This search engine is shaped as a web browser addon (WebExtension standard format). The search and sort job is handled by the the extension itself, on the computer of the user and it allows to gives the user fine grained control over the tool.

Meta-Press.es is already able to search through hundreds of sources and this number regularly grows.

Using Meta-Press.es, there is no central server involved, to watch over and profile users, to adapt search results to their behavior and habits or to add targeted ads. So there is no bubble effect like with commercial mainstream search engines.

Meta-Press.es works great with the Tor Browser (which have been made, among other goals, to read the press with more confidentiality than with an ordinary web browser).

It’s otherwise recommanded to use the DNS resolver Quad9 (via Firefox for example) to avoid local administrative censorships.

It also works on Android via Fennec F-Droid an Android version of Firefox installable from the libre software catalogue F-Droid.

Meta-Press.es is a free / libre software with open sources. Those whom know HTML and JavaScript can explore its source code and adapt the tool to their needs (or easily add new sources).

To finish, Meta-Press.es is an energy efficient tool : there is no need for polar circle datacenters to perform searches through the online press…

1.1. Limits

Limits of Meta-Press.es are to search only through recent news (access to older results will be available in the future), to only sort results by chronological order and to need users to install a web browser addon…

2. How does it work?

Meta-Press.es is a meta-search engine that allows you to query the internal search engine of each source (knows to the system and selected for the search).

You will get the number of alleged results in all the sources, and the newest available results from each.

Newspapers are scrapped from the web (or RSS feeds of results), one by one. So you save, at each query, the time that the developpers spent parsing the newspapers :-)

Doing this Meta-Press.es won’t activate any ad. or social trackers of the queried newspapers, protecting your privacy, but it gives you back the choice of your information sources and clearly states in which source it searched.

Once you get the results, you can select and export some results in a re-usable format (RSS, jSON, CSV…). You’ll be able to re-import them later or use them somewhere else (send them by email to a friend, import them in a WordPress…).