Accidental News Explorer iPhone app a lost cause

The free Accidental News Explorer iPhone app has a nice aesthetic feel – the fonts and colors recall an old atlas map or globe. Its content, however, is pretty forgettable.

The home page of the Accidental News Explorer iPhone is largely blank, save for a search feature that allows you enter a topic or place of your choosing.

It then transmits the user to a long, vertical scrolling list of articles and news items that pertain to the subject matter that was entered. A search of “Mexico,” for example, produced about two dozen stories that included references to everything from the ongoing drug war to Mexican soccer player Jonathan Dos Santos being given a red card during a recent match.

The news aggregator draws articles from a wide variety of sources, including major news outlets like the Boston Herald, as well as smaller community papers and Web sites.

That is about the extent of it. The app could be useful for someone who has an interest in a specific region, or area or study. Or if someone has some time to kill and they are diddling around on their phone.

But there are other news apps that are better organized and more reliable than the Accidental News Explorer app. And really, if you have the time or interest in searching random topics, you might as well just stick to Google.

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