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Dialog Launches Dialog Live News

New Personalized News Monitoring Service Now Available Through Company’s Business Information, News & Market Research Platform

CARY, N.C., USA (October 4, 2004) — Dialog, a Thomson (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC) business and a leading worldwide provider of online-based information services and integrated information solutions, today announced the launch of Dialog Live News, a new personalized news monitoring service that offers automated streaming of real-time news reports from 2,300 global sources.

Dialog Live News is now available for subscription as a stand-alone service or as an optional add-on feature to two of the company's other online services, Dialog® NewsRoom (a database of news reports from around the world) and Dialog Profound® (a market research service).

The new service resides on a recently launched technology platform that also hosts other Dialog business information, news and market intelligence services, and shares an intuitive, easy-to-use interface with the other services.

"Our launch of Dialog Live News underscores our commitment to be the world's leading provider of both real-time news alerting and news research for the professionals and organizations we serve," said Cynthia Murphy, Dialog senior vice president, strategic marketing. "By coupling the new service with either Dialog NewsRoom or Dialog Profound, users can be instantly alerted to news as it is breaking, and then immediately gather the analysis and perspective they need to react quickly and intelligently."

Said Murphy: "We've married the automated tools to proactively track news with the ability to put that news into its proper context — all in a seamless, friendly online environment."

Dialog Live News enables users to continuously track news on their desktops without disrupting their workflow. Users can create up to 10 profiles on topics relevant to their professions or businesses (such as competitors, regulatory agencies, market sectors or other subjects) and then receive streaming headlines of news reports that match those profiles, virtually instantly after the articles and reports are first published or distributed. Dialog Live News can be viewed from within the service itself, or it can be detached and run as other desktop applications are operating.

User can click on a scrolling headline to access the fulltext of the news report.

Dialog Live News can instantly deliver such news reports as competitors' announcements, shifting market conditions, crisis events, earnings announcements, product launches, geopolitical developments, economic indicators and regulatory announcements, among numerous other topics.

Dialog Live News is the latest service to be available through a shared technology platform that hosts other Dialog business information, news and market research services. Recently introduced versions of Dialog Profound and Dialog NewsRoom are now operating on the platform, with new versions of Dialog Intelliscope^SM and Dialog NewsEdge® slated to be launched on the platform next year. (The current versions of Dialog Intelliscope and Dialog NewsEdge may be accessed now through the same interface as Dialog NewsRoom, Dialog Profound and Dialog Live News.)

The new platform features an intuitive user-friendly interface with separate opening-screen tabs that link to each individual service, enabling users to readily search related arrays of content simultaneously and also to move between Dialog services without delay. The interface is designed to make it easy for occasional researchers to find relevant information quickly, while also meeting the demanding needs of experienced professional searchers with powerful, more advanced search options.

The launch of Dialog Live News is also the latest in a series of moves by Dialog to bolster its portfolio of news services. The company recently announced enhancements to its Dialog NewsEdge service.

Each of the Dialog news services offers varying features and price levels that meet the needs of different organizations.

Dialog Live News, along with the other services now hosted on the shared Dialog technology platform, incorporates SmartTerms™, a proprietary indexing system developed by Dialog for its family of business information, news and market intelligence services. SmartTerms utilizes more than 855,000 terms in its taxonomy.

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About Dialog and The Thomson Corporation
Dialog, a pioneer in developing the technology behind electronic information retrieval, is the world leader in providing online-based information services to organizations seeking competitive advantages in such fields as government, business, science, engineering, finance and law.

The online services provided by Dialog — offered through the Dialog®, Dialog Profound®, Dialog DataStar™, Dialog NewsEdge® and Dialog Intelliscope^SM brands — give users the ability to precisely retrieve data from more than 1.4 billion unique records, accessible via the Internet or through delivery to enterprise intranets. Searchable content includes articles and reports from thousands of real-time news feeds, newspapers, broadcast transcripts and trade publications, plus research reports and analyst notes providing support for financial decision-making, as well as in-depth repositories of scientific and technical data, patents, trademarks and other intellectual property data. Information professionals and end-users at business, professional and government organizations in more than 100 countries prize Dialog services for their depth and breadth of content, precision searching and speed.

Based in Cary, N.C., USA, Dialog has operations in 27 countries. Dialog (www.dialog.com) is a business of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC). With 2003 revenues of US$7.6 billion, Thomson (www.thomson.com) is a global leader in providing integrated information solutions to business and professional customers.

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All designated trademarks used herein are the property of The Dialog Corporation or its subsidiaries. Registered marks are registered by The Dialog Corporation or its subsidiaries with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. All other marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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