Upgraded version of Alltheweb.com search engine offers near real-time searches in over 3,000 online news sources. Sure, it’s just a press release in the guise of a news story, but sounds like it may be worth a look, as searching for breaking news is not one of the Web’s strong suits:

‘Entering “Anthrax,” for example, can bring up news stories that were updated less than an hour ago from both national and local news organizations from various countries, and in a multitude of languages. The advanced search allows a user to set language preferences and also to pick what sections of the news to search.

Fast has added a new search “vertical,” allowing specific news searches. However, the most recent results from the news vertical are also displayed in a gray box on top of the general search results page.

“We want to show our customers that we can crawl fast, this is a subsecond index,” said Rob Rubin, executive vice president and general manager of Fast’s Internet division. “We are now continuously spidering and indexing over 3,000 news sources.” ‘

Here, for a start, is an Alltheweb search on “alltheweb”. I haven’t added any filtering options so it comes up with hits in many languages.