I have a new idea and I am pitching it to Google (by pitching, I mean posting it here and hoping that someone important reads it). It will be a combination of their Answers and News services. Here is how it will work.

You will provide Google with a set of topics you'd like to receive news about. You can give them as many or as few as you'd like and you can specify how often and how much news you'll receive. For instance, I might ask for news about Russian Politics, Apple Computers, the Chicago Bulls and Supreme Court decisions. The cost would depend on the difficulty of retrieval, with a lot of news being free. For instance, the articles on the Bulls would be free, unless I wanted every major article printed daily, which would make it, say, $.50/day. Also, if I wanted news about Girls HS Volleyball in Orange County, CA, which is less available than Bulls news, then there would also be a charge. Essentially, if a computer can filter the news it would be free, but if you need articles above and beyond that, there would be a charge.

Another way to do this would be to set a price and a parameter, then people can sign up to retrieve the news for you. So if I was willing to pay $5 a month for news on RPGs for the PS2 then anyone willing to find the information for me could sign up.

There is already a service that does the free version of this, the kind that just does the filtering. It is called MyWay and it is pretty good, but has limited filtering options. I'm assuming that they offer whatever categories the wire services provide. I would want to have infinite filtering options. I know that some company, probably Google, could do this really well.

Any suggestions or comments from the peanut gallery?