Google has recently made available at http: / / news.google.com an automated “newspaper”, which searches continuously about 4,500 news sources, and lets users view automatically generated headlines in a few general areas or lets users search for news by keywords. The automatic determination of which news items or news stories are most important is done by 3 main criteria: In how many sources the news item appeared, how important are the news sources in which it appeared, and how close it is to the top in each of these news sources. However, many problems still remain, such as for example: a. The choice of a single main news source and a
single image for each item seems arbitrary to the user and limits the user. b. If the user clicks on the “related items” link for that item the user always gets a linear
list of typically hundreds or even more than a thousand links to related news items, sorted either by relevance or by time, however, the new
list is now without any images and without any clustering, so that many times news stories that are about the same event or even identical, may appear at different positions in the
list of related links, and various other news items may appear between them and are typically also dispersed in various places. This makes it vary hard for the user to take
advantage efficiently of the list of related items. The present invention solves the above problem by creating recursive clustering, so that preferably at any level in the tree the user can preferably either choose a specific news item from the cluster or from the shown sub-clusters or continue in the tree. Another improvement is that searching the Meta News by keywords can generate an automatic newspaper in a way similar to the original automatically generated newspaper. Many additional improvements to the concept of automated newspapers and / or news MetaSearch are also shown. Other improvements are suggested for improved shareware MetaSearch, improved Web pages search, and other types of searches.