NewsCompare - A novel application for detecting news influence in a country

Abstract

We present a new application, developed mostly from scratch, serving as a fast and efficient web crawler, with added network visualization and content analysis tools. It can be used to perform experimental research in a number of fields, including web graph analysis, basic text comparison or even testing out sociological theories, depending on the user’s inclination. A use case is provided, where the application is applied to Romanian news websites, from which several interesting observations can be drawn. The application itself and its code are released under a GPL license, and can be used by other researchers as-is (for use cases similar to our own), or expanded upon by interested developers. Keywords: Web crawler, Web scraper, Text similarity, Social networks