One morning last week I heard that there was a massive fire at Hatibagan, a major market in north Calcutta. Several weeks earlier, I had been told that Rediff had launched new service — RealTime News, a news search engine.

I decided to give it a try. I typed http://realtime.rediff.com/ instasearch and instantly a search box appeared. As I began typing my query the predictive tool kicked in and I was offered possible suggestions for what I could be interested in. Without even a split second lag the instant search loaded the results to my query. I got 127 results and 10 images. The results displayed articles from The Indian, Economic Times and 51 other sources. Very satisfying, apparently, but the best report was buried deep under the 127 results.

Basically, I got the results because I knew what I was searching for. If I didn’t, then what would happen? Realtime News offers a map view for major news happenings in India. The intention of the map view is to give you localised content. First, you get to see an all-India map with little boxes highlighting the news in major cities and towns of the country and at the bottom the number of news items which ranged from a staggering 145 to 600. Zooming into Calcutta, the news item highlighted was “Neha Dhupia likes to kiss clean shaven men”! Clearly pedestrian. Not only was the latest news not displayed, it did not even figure in the top 20 that popped up when you clicked on the square box.

The growth and development of Internet technology makes it possible to view breaking news as it happens. Major news channels such as CNN, or NDTV provide options for you to receive real time news on your computer or smartphone as notifications. It also provides options for you to receive real time news in the categories you select. So I asked myself why would I want to visit Rediff’s RealTime news search. It seemed such an anachronism, and an outdated method of building a website.

Suppose you want to reach a destination and don’t know how to get there. You ask people for directions. Most people use one of two methods of response. They either offer you detailed turn-by-turn instructions with street names or they use landmarks to guide you. In this case I found it difficult to reach the landmark as I tried to navigate through Rediff’s RealTime News. When I put a search for another news item, Realtime News offered suggestions on Mahatma Gandhi. Around eight news items popped up but when I clicked on them they did not have anything to do with Gandhi. So as a navigational tool, I found it wanting.

On the right sidebar of the news search results page, some related news stories were displayed. When I clicked on the additional stories, I found they were just a rehash of a previously reported story with no new information. At other times even the reporting was weak and the story appeared mundane. What the site really gave me was a number of stories on the same topic from all possible sources on the web, which is not even helpful if I am researching a particular news item. I need to be guided by the website to the best possible result.

I asked Kalpana Banerjee, who heads the team developing Realtime News, how can an exclusive story from a newspaper or website be buried deep under 400 results. She explained that it works on the basis of some algorithms and keywords. If the headline does not have the keyword, the algorithms ignore it. Clearly, Rediff has a lot more work to do on this front. Major newspapers, or websites, well-known reporters, have to be taken into account while displaying the results. Also the stories displayed must be given some sort of weightage so that mundane news reports are not highlighted in their map view.

With smartphones and tablets being increasingly used, one rarely needs to go to a website. There are apps for everything. It would be nice if Rediff had an app like Wikipanion for RealTime News search. For now, those who do not own a tablet and smartphone, Realtime News is not too bad despite its flaws. Banerjee promised that the site would get better as a lot of new features are in the pipeline.

Send your computer- related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com with bits&bytes as the subject line