How is ReNews any different from other newsreaders ?

Firstly, a typical newsreader is not web based. What this means is that articles aren't retrieved from the web, instead they're retrieved from your network providers news server. This is an important point because a news server will usually have only the last 2 weeks of articles from a subset of all newsgroups. Articles older than 2 weeks are automatically deleted. This is due to the shear volume of information in newsgroups. Most network providers just can't cope with keeping articles much longer for every newsgroup.

ReNews on the other hand, uses a massive web based archive of all text articles that have been posted to the majority of newsgroups since 1995. The articles add up to nearly 500 gigabytes and are growing by the hour. There's been a lot of useful discussions over the last 5 year and ReNews can get to them. So, the sheer volume of data that ReNews uses is signifcantly greater than that of your traditional newsreader.

Secondly, a typical newsreader will show you the article headings from a newsgroup that you select. The problem with this is that there are over 40,000 newsgroups to choose from. Sure, if you know the exact newsgroup to look in this is not a problem but you can never be sure that another equally appropriate newsgroup has popped up and you might be missing out.

ReNews is great in this regard because you don't have to know which newsgroup to look in at all. A search can be done over all newsgroups or you can specify whole collections of newsgroups by specifying an "In newsgroups like" search term. After a search, you get a bonus in the form of a newsgroup summary. This is a very handy feature that gives you a real indication of which newsgroups are discussing your keywords and to what degree.

Finally, with a typical newsreader, when you chose one of the 40,000 newsgroups to view only the last 2 weeks of articles, what you get is a list of article headings. You have to decide from each article heading whether that article is appropriate to download and read.

One of the most powerful features of ReNews is its searching capability. When you do a search on ReNews, it searches through the text of both the subject heading and the body of the article. What this means is that the article list you get from a ReNews search is much more targeted and specific saving you time and removing the frustration of scouring through pages and pages of inappropriate news articles.

If you want to try ReNews for yourself then download a fully functional version of ReNews.

If you've already tried ReNews and are ready to buy, then check out what you get when you register or register here.

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