Factiva has certainly stolen a lead on its rivals ­- chief among them LexisNexis and Thomson Dialog -­ with its newly released Factiva 2.0 beta.

Some may sneer that Factiva is simply jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, but with Google continuing to pile the pressure on with its own Web 2.0 personalisation features, it may well be the news services that fail to keep up in this race who will be sneered at later.

Web 2.0 is a generic term for online hosted applications and services that allow users to adapt their interface. In Factiva’s case, this means being able to create a personalised homepage on the initial search screen that has RSS newsfeeds from your favourite news sources displayed alongside your Factiva alerts (created from individual search terms).

Factiva users will notice the Factiva Search 2.0 beta tab in the top left-hand corner of their screen when they log in. Click on the tab and you’ll go to the new interface, which is initially populated with news feeds Factiva deems relevant to you. These news feeds come from 13 global regions, and their relevance is determined by the language used by the browser and the IP address of the user.

When we logged in, for example, Factiva recognised we were English speaking and coming from a UK IP address. Hence our screen had a range of feeds from well-known broadsheets -­ ranging from The Guardian to The Daily Telegraph . But if you accessed the site in Shanghai, you’d find a range of Chinese language newspaper feeds.

Factiva offers feeds relevant to different sections (Comment & Analysis, Arts, Business News, etc) of each newspaper, but the initial display shows the Default section. You can change this by clicking on the Add Content button in the top left-hand corner, selecting the newspaper, and then selecting a different section, before clicking the Add to Page button to get the new feed displayed.

By default, Factiva displays the most recent three postings in that newsfeed, but by clicking the + or ­ buttons within the box, you can increase or decrease the number of headlines displayed.

Rearrange your page

You can move the different feeds around the page and arrange them in any order. If you no longer want a feed on your page, click the x button in the top right-hand corner, and it will be deleted.

Factiva has three columns for you to play around with ­ possibly news feeds from newspapers in one, news feeds from magazines in another, and news feeds from the range of Editors Choice feeds in the last. When you’ve got the arrangement that suits you, click the Save this button. Factiva asks you for an email address, to which it sends a confirmation email (all the data for your personalisation is held on the Factiva servers, so no matter from where in the world you log on, it will display your personal set-up).

A box showing your Factiva Alerts can also be added and this will display relevant headlines when an alert is generated.

When we tested the system, we found the beta a little clunky in moving feed boxes around the display, with image shadowing and some delays in screen redrawing. We also found that many of the Editor’s Choice feeds were in foreign languages which we had no customisable control over. We could also add only one Editor’s Choice box at a time ­ a pretty drastic restriction if you want to track multiple industry sectors.

Factiva has also introduced Web 2.0 features elsewhere within the standard Factiva service. For instance, you can now change the order of charts and graphs in the Discovery Pane, the various “related information” features arrayed down the right-hand side of the display screen for the results of a search. Changes to the Discovery Pane will remain until changed again by the user.

Allied to this is the ability to export results from the Discovery Pane. Article timelines, most mentioned companies and the other Discovery objects can be saved as image files and then included in reports, presentations or emails.

Discovery data can now also be integrated into workflow more easily using the Factiva Developers Kit to integrate XML data feeds from the service. This could include sources, industries, news clusters and keywords, as well as the Factiva Search box itself.Google is making the running here, but Factiva is rising to the challenge, and while we have some reservations about limitations to the range of feeds available, we see Factiva Search 2.0 as a significant marker for future development.