The Financial Times Group announced today the BETA launch of Newssift.com, a next generation search tool for business professionals. With the ability to search thousands of global business news sources, Newssift offers comprehensive, meaning-based results that contextualize the trends, opinions, and qualitative events that shape business decisions and impact corporate reputations. Newssift is a free-standing entity within the Financial Times Group.

As the media landscape continues to evolve, more people are using the Internet as their primary news source. Newssift allows you to look for up-to-date news and analysis online to know before you go, streamlining the process of search and search refinement for business decision makers. Newssift delivers precise and more relevant qualitative business news, moving beyond traditional key word search.

“Unlike traditional search, Newssift was developed to enable users to string together a query that can provide insight into the relationship between people, organizations, geography, and business theme, which ultimately facilitates more informed business decisions,” said Robin Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, FT Search, the creators of Newssift.com. “There are only a few search engines that employ relationship-based or semantic algorithms, and to date there is no other that accomplishes refinement using a business point of view.”

Much research has shown that many of today’s business users are dissatisfied with current search tools, finding traditional key word search technologies difficult to use and unable to comprehend contextual relationships. Newssift was launched to respond to this void — creating a user-friendly and meaning-based search that easily locates and compares qualitative business news across thousands of reputable sources. Each day, thousands of news sources are aggregated and annotated to ensure the most relevant and deep analysis of current global business news. Newssift then searches data based on meaning and relationships, cutting out the commercial clutter found in traditional key word search.

“Today, we’re introducing a resource for business that offers capabilities not available on any other search site,” said John Greenleaf, Chief Marketing Officer of FT Search. “Newssift thinks the way business people think and interacts directly with the user, offering results that are meaningful, relevant and ultimately pertinent to important metrics like stock price valuation and corporate reputation.”

Similar to the way one would search and compare merchandise on retail websites, Newssift ultimately analyzes the relationship between people, organizations, geographies, and business themes. An example that highlights the Newssift.com difference and demonstrates how the tool works is that while traditional search results can help you to find a local florist in Florida for your mother’s birthday, Newssift can enable you to analyze the state of the floral industry in Florida.