Skip to main content.

About

Just Samachar is a news aggregation site for an Indian audience.

Features

Apart from the obvious Just Samachar offers the following -

Different views
Apart from the normal view which displays the news by source, two other views are provided.

Tag View - We don't always have the time to go through the news from all the sources in different categories.Tag View We need something which allows us to quickly learn what's happening around us. What's hot and what's not? The Tag View is the 'In the news' section on steroids. View all the news as keywords (tags) on one page with their font size and colour determined by how big a story is at that moment. If any theme interests you, just click on that tag to get a list of headlines right there. The biggest news in the last week and month is also just a click away.

River of News - Not everyone prefers the normal 'news boxed by source' view. River of News I'm partial to it sometimes, but I also understand the argument behind the River of News approach to reading news. What's that? To me, it's consuming news with an emphasis on time and not the source. Whenever you visit this view, you get a long list of the latest news items. You can also see the top stories of the moment and related items. Read what the person who coined the phrase has to say about it here. Although it originated with reference to RSS Feed readers, it has been widely hijacked now.

Set default view - Since different views are available, you can select the one you like and make it your default, so that on every visit, your preferred view is loaded. Please note that cookies need to be enabled to use this. They usually are, but if Just Samachar does not remember your preference, just enable it.

Headlines added since last visit are highlighted with the icon.
This I believe is an important feature that no other news source I use provides, and I really don't know why as it's not very difficult to do. It's very irritating to go through the same headlines on every visit to a site. To prevent that, in the normal view, Just Samachar puts a next to every headline that has been added since you last visited. So, it's easy to just read those headlines and move on. If a headline has a icon next to it, it means that it was present when you last visited the site and you've (probably) read it.

But, remember that if you visit the site only once every few days, all the headlines will be new. So, it's probably useful if you're the kind who refreshes the page once or twice a day.

Additional tools

Every time you click on a news article, Just Samachar provides additional tools. They can be found at the top right hand corner and look like the image below.

Frame Options

Read Later - Click on this link to save the news article for later reading. The last 50 saved articles can be accessed at http://justsamachar.com/my This feature requires cookies to be enabled.
E-mail to friend - No matter which site you are reading the news article on, Just Samachar allows you to forward the link to your friends or family. So, you can easily share articles that you find interesting even if the source site doesn't provide the facility. Also, Just Samachar does not ask for your e-mail id, so you don't have to worry about being spammed.

If you don't want the additional tools, just click on the Cancel icon and you will not see them again.

Stats Stats
Interesting statistics are available based on data collected from the time Just Samachar was launched (February, 2006). For now, you can see the most popular topics by month across categories. The most popular topics by category is also available. This is an attempt to capture what was in the news at a particular point in time. More statistics will be added in the future. If you are a stats junkie like me and would like to use the data in interesting ways, do drop me a line.
Search
Just Samachar archives all the news articles for a month and all of it is searchable by time and category. If available, related search terms are shown to help you narrow down your search. Boolean Search is supported. To know more about boolean search and how it can be used on Just Samachar, read this (technical documentation alert!).
Most popular news for every category
Most popular news for every category, and also a single page with the most popular news from all categories is available for the day, past week and month. This is generated based on the news articles visitors read.
RSS feeds
For people who live in their RSS readers, Just Samachar provides RSS feeds with the popular news articles for all the categories, and one feed for all popular news combined. The icon denotes an RSS feed. If you're not familiar with RSS, here's a good introduction.
In The News
This section shows keywords that represent what's hot in the news in the last 24 hours. The font size of the words corresponds to the popularity of the story among the news sources Just Samachar tracks. The tag cloud (as it is also called) shows what's happening in a glance. Clicking on the keyword/tag will display all related news stories in the past month.
Archives
All the headlines from the past month specific to a news source can be viewed at once on the archives page. The archives page can also be accessed from the normal view by clicking on the Archives icon next to the name of each source.

Why Just Samachar?

Among the most popular of similar sites is Samachar.com, the grand-daddy of all Indian news aggregation sites. Samachar.com has always been very popular among Indians as a news source. At the time it was launched in the late 90's, Samachar.com was a pioneer as there was no other way to easily get the news from different sources in one place. I've been using Samachar.com for many years now.

While everything around it has been changing, unfortunately, Samachar.com hasn't. There have been no improvements in the usability of the site for as long as I can remember. Also, there are too many advertisements on the site. It was not a problem earlier because Samachar.com added value by getting all that content that wasn't easily available, but it's no longer the case. RSS has changed everything. So, I wondered if I could build something similar with "just" Samachar and nothing else and what you're seeing is the result.

But, why would anyone want to use something like Just Samachar or Samachar.com when we have Google News?

Google News is awesome and I use it too. But, sometimes, especially when it comes to specific categories like cricket news, I prefer to have a pageful of links from all the popular sources in the Samachar.com format. This does have the problem of showing up the same news stories separately, i.e, it does not "cluster" similar stories together, but it's just a personal preference which I know I share with other people. Also, Google News does not highlight the links that have been added since the user last visited, which saves a lot of time if you visit news sites a few times everyday. As they say... different strokes for different folks.

Do you really think people will stop using Samachar.com and use Just Samachar instead?

No! I built Just Samachar to make my life a little easier and learn new things at the same time. If it works for you, go ahead and use it.

Copyright

Copyright of all news content belongs to the content providers. Everything else is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (?) license. That basically means you can do whatever you want to with the data available from Just Samachar.

Acknowledgements

Contact

If you have any suggestions or spot any bugs (especially if you spot any bugs!), please write to me. Thanks!