Earlier this year Topix CEO Chris Tolles got the call no one wants to get – that they were under investigation by a government entity. Two attorneys general, one of which was deep into his senate run, were leveling accusations of abuse at Topix. The company eventually settled with thirty three AGs, plus two U.S. territories. We asked Chris to tell us about his experience dealing with these people. Too often, we’ve found, the office of attorney general is used for little more than a way to advance one’s political career.

“Would you like to comment on the accusations being made about your site by the Attorney General?” Excuse me? What is it about the week after my birthday? Two years ago, Google launched a local news product the day after my birthday and this year, it was Cheryl Truman of the Lexington KY Herald-Leader calling me with this little gem.

Evidently, this is how a California company finds out that the Attorneys General of Kentucky and Connecticut have “significant concerns” about how your company does business. They have a press conference. When I told Cheryl I had no idea what she was talking about, she kindly forwarded me the press release from Jack Conway, the Attorney General of Kentucky. → Read More

The state Attorneys General are busy today. In addition to the Washington AG hitting up Intelius with a fine and injunction for its years-long post transaction marketing scams, the Attorneys General from thirty three states, plus the AG Guam and the AG of the Northern Mariana Islands (wherever that is) have entered into an agreement with Topix to stop their $20 fee for expedited review of inappropriate content.

This is content that individuals or entities find to be offensive or damaging. Topix takes up to seven days, they say, to review flagged content, but payment of the priority fee pushes the complaint to the top of the list. From the joint statement, embedded in full below: → Read More

I’m from a relatively small city in Ohio called Pepper Pike. If I want to find out news about it, the easiest thing for me to do is Google “Pepper Pike News.” The number one result is quite useful: Topix.

In fact, Topix is the number one result for a ton of small towns across the country. That’s what happens when you’ve been aggregating local news for six years. But the site has never garnered much attention in the startup scene because back in 2005 (before TechCrunch even existed — our initial coverage was in 2007), it took a majority equity investment from three of the largest media firms in the U.S., Knight Ridder, Tribune and Gannett. Since then, the focus has been all about getting the business to work. → Read More

This is a quick post because I’m getting on a plane to Europe, but fast-growing news site Topix has a new CEO. Rich Skrenta has stepped down, and VP Marketing Chris Tolles has taken his position. See Tolles’ blog post on this here, and everyone’s bios here. The official explanation is below. The real explanation will come out soon, I’m sure: Even though we were seeing eye-to-eye on what needed to be done, after the press tour and some initial conversation about where we needed to go, Rich told me that he wasn’t having as much fun right now, and looking at what we needed to do, didn’t see much opportunity for what he really loves to do — architect from the metal on up and put out the 1.0 that is so far ahead of everything else. See our coverage of the company here. They’ve raised around $20 million in funding. → Read More

News site Topix.net will relaunch this evening under their newly acquired domain name Topix.com. They are also launching a new product that will allow readers to write and edit local news articles directly. The news was first written about by USA Today this afternoon. Topix is partly funded by USA Today’s parent company, Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune. Topix already has local news pages for cities and towns across the United States and Canada (here’s the page for Atherton, CA). The news is auto-generated for those pages currently. Tonight, Topix will let users of the site become local editors, and write or expand on articles that will be of interest to that community. Topix started allowing readers to leave comments on the site just over a year ago. The first editors will be selected from heavy commenters on the site. Screen shots below. See the Topix corporate blog, and CEO Rich Skrenta’s personal thoughts as well. → Read More

News search engine Topix.net has announced that has taken $15 million in additional funding from three large media companies, Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy. The company raised a round about 18 months ago for an undisclosed sum that was only said to be under $5 million. That funding came from Tribune, Gannet and Knight-Ridder, who have since been acquired by McClatchy. Topix brings a long list of features to news search and focuses on local information. The company was started by several founders of the DMOZ directory. The company says that it is currently experiencing substantial growth, something that traffic analysts Hitwise confirm. Hitwise reported in September that Topix’s market share in online news had grown 24% in one month since an August relaunch, that the site gets more traffic than the LA Times and the NY Post; Topix visitors were unusually weighted towards states like Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina and its users were 29% more likely to be over the age of 55 than the average Internet user. What does Topix offer that Yahoo! News and Google News don’t? A few things. When Topix relaunched in August, the company said its index had grown to include 50,000 news sources – 10 times more than the Google News and 7 times as large as Yahoo! News. Topix has topical pages, has strong search by zip code, integrates relatively active forums and visualization. The year long time line displayed with every search is a fast way to skip to a particular date in a news search and shows the context of the point in time you are skipping to. Try using the timeline on Topix and then try to accomplish the same result with Yahoo or Google news search. Topix also has the most extensive support for RSS. Though traffic stats have to be taken with a giant grain of salt, look at those demographics intersecting with the feature set. Topix is proof that you can load a site up with features and still win over mainstream users. The company provides local and national news to online publications owned by their investors like the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun. Topix also powers Ask.com’s local search and says it has other distribution deals with Yahoo!, Bloglines, Newsgator, CitySearch and several other large sites. Topix has always been a forward looking company; before Google starting moving to → Read More

Topix.net, possibly the most feature rich news search engine online already, has relaunched and looks very cool. The Topix index of 50,000 news sources is 10 times larger than the Google News index and 7 times as large as Yahoo! News. Topix really focuses on local search. Today’s relaunch makes the search results on Topix much easier to use than they have been before. Founded in 2002 by some of the creators of the DMOZ open directory project, majority stake in Topix is now owned by media companies Gannett, McClatchy/Knight Ridder and the Tribune Company. The best new feature in this week’s relaunch is the visual timeline for the number of results from each day in the last year. It’s like Technorati’s blog search timeline, but on Topix you can click any point in the visual and see results from that day and prior. Google and Yahoo News results only go back 30 days or less. Searches on Topix are now case sensitive, so you can search for “IT” for example, without getting a page full of results for the word “it.” Search results from blogs are highlighted with a little blue “B” next to the story titles. Integrating blog and news search results by default is a nice touch. Words in the result excerpts that have their own dedicated topic pages are highlighted and display a drop down box of their own recent results. With forums and classified ads and loads of news categories, Topix really flirts with feature overload. In the past, pages been too messy to use. This week’s relaunch is focused on some very helpful changes though and makes this powerful site easier to use. In fact, I’d say it’s gone from being almost unusable to being a uniquely powerful news search service. → Read More

Topix.net added 15,000 top blogs into its news engine today. Unlike Yahoo, which took the step of integrating blog search results into the news area but pushed them off to the side, Topix has integrated blog posts into results in the same manner as their other 12,000 news feeds. The Topix blog post announcing the addition gives great information on how they chose the 15,000 feeds, and how blog coverage differs from traditional news coverage. Good stuff. I’m really happy to see this. → Read More