Martin Belam has been engaged in some online heavy lifting to create Chipwrapper. It’s a custom search that just returns results from major UK news sites.

What’s to like? As Lloyd Shepherd points out, Martin has created something that wasn’t there before. To express it in genuinely clunky terms – it allies online distribution with “real world” distribution.

For me, there’s a slight issue with the fact that search results aren’t clearly ordered by time, which is the thing I like best about Google News. Here, for example is a search today on the sad passing of Jane Tomlinson:

As you can see, a local BBC story from May 2007 pops up first.

Still, such quibbles feel a bit churlish, so final word is that Martin has produced a very welcome addition to the online toolset and I’ll certain be sticking it on the bookmark bar.