Topsy Labs is releasing a social, realtime search engine for mobile devices today, enabling users to discover relevant chatter about any topic based on data from Twitter and Google+.
The search engine comes with a nifty “Social Time Machine” feature that enables users to look up results on a timeline that can be controlled with a slider (see screenshots below). → Read More
Realtime search and analytics platform company Topsy Labs this morning announced that it has added Google+ as a source in its index.
A dedicated search engine for public Google+ posts, available here in beta, lets users search and access realtime and historical conversations occurring within the social network, ranked by the startup’s proprietary relevance and influence-ranking technology. → Read More
Realtime search startup Topsy Labs has raised $15 million in Series C funding today from BlueRun Ventures, Western Technology Investments, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister. This brings the company’s total funding to $30 million.
Topsy indexes and ranks search results based the conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried. What differentiates Topsy is that it focuses slightly more on data from Twitter and also holds on to data forever and results are powered by influencers tweeting about content within the social web. Topsy also says that its fast indexing technology is capable of processing over 1 million documents per second, which makes it well-suited for realtime search. → Read More
We wrote last week of realtime search startup OneRiot’s move to recharge its business model; shutting down its search portal and focusing exclusively on its advertising network. Prior to this shift, OneRiot had released a search API to allow partners to integrate realtime search into their applications. Today, the startup is announcing that it has transitioned its search partners to fellow realtime search engine Topsy.
It appears that the announcement is definitely a two-way deal. As part of the relationship, Topsy is using OneRiot’s realtime search ads, which will appear within the search platform’s website. Similar to OneRiot, Collecta and other realtime search engines, Topsy indexes and ranks search results based the conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried. What differentiates Topsy is that it focuses slightly more on data from Twitter and also holds on to data forever. Topsy results are powered by influencers tweeting about content within the social web. → Read More
If you’ve ever tried to use Twitter Search, you know that it’s got some pretty serious problems. First, the site only lets you search back through a couple weeks of tweets. Even worse, the service doesn’t seem to employ any relevancy algorithm to speak of — you just see the most recent tweets that contain your query’s keywords, regardless of who said them (which oftentimes yields junk and spam). Today Topsy, the startup that views tweets as the currency of the web, is launching a handful of new features that improve on the official Twitter search in almost every way.
Up until now, Topsy has been based entirely around links. When you visited the site, it would prompt you to enter a search query, and then would display a list of links most relevant to whatever you searched for. The links are ranked by the number of times they’ve been retweeted, and also by the influence of the people who have tweeted them; the site actually keeps track of the number of retweets each user typically gets to establish their overall reputation. Now, Topsy is taking this reputation system and extending it beyond just links, allowing you to search for both photos and tweets that don’t contain links at all. → Read More
We wrote that Twitturly filled a bit of a void when it was launched in April 2008 as a sort of Techmeme for all that gets linked on Twitter. Much of the initial excitement over its link tracking abilities ebbed away rather swiftly regardless, and competitors like Tweetmeme and Topsy have stolen much of Twitturly’s thunder since its launch.
Joel Strellner, who started the project, finally put Twitturly up for sale on Flippa ten days ago, and the auction just ended. Only five bids came in, and the sale ultimately netted no more than $8,500 – Strellner was hoping for double that amount. → Read More
Real time search and discovery engine Topsy is releasing a bunch of new products and tools this afternoon.
Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too.
One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing. → Read More
While there have been many real-time search engine launches over the past few months (Scoopler, Topsy, Collecta, CrowdEye), most of them so far have fizzled (see Google Website Trends chart above). After an initial burst of curiosity, interest tends to dive. One exception, however, is OneRiot, which appears to be gaining some early traction in the real-time search race.
This race has just begun, of course, and other real-time search startups are chasing hard. But OneRiot is already serving up results for more than one million search queries a day (see chart below). → Read More
One of the hottest areas of search right now is real time search, which attempts to find results based on what is happening right now. Twitter’s search engine fast becoming one of the key ways to navigate the service and discover what people are thinking about any subject at any given moment. Facebook is testing out ways to let you search your personal stream. Google is waking up to the challenge as well (Larry Page is particularly concerned with keeping up).
Every week, it seems, a new startup launches tackling real time search from a different angle. (Collecta, One Riot, Scoopler, Topsy, Almost.at, Tweetmeme, CrowdEye, Omgili, to name a few).. They are trying to apply real time search to all the different streams of information flowing over the Internet right now: Twitter, Facebook feeds, Digg submissions, blog comments, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube uploads, shared links on bit.ly and elsewhere. The list keeps getting longer every day.
There is something about human nature which makes us want to prioritize information by how recent it is, and that is the fundamental appeal of real time search. The difference between real time search and regular search didn’t really crystallize for me until I had a conversation with Edo Segal, who sold his real time search company Relegence to AOL a few years ago and holds three patents on the subject. “Real time taps into consciousness,” says Segal, “search taps into memory. That is why it so potent. You experience the world in real time.” → Read More
New search engine Topsy, which has been in stealth development for three years, launches, well, now.
Before Google, search engines like AltaVista determined relevance based on how well a web page matched the query. Then came Google, which views the web as a network of documents. Today, all search engines analyze linking behavior around the web. When a web page is linked to a lot, it’s given more influence than other pages competing for attention around the same topics/keywords. Jeff Jarvis summed it all up nicely in 2005 “In this new world, links are currency. Links grant authority. Links build branding. Links equal value.” There’s lots more to it, but the notion that links create value is what drives Internet search.
Well, it’s no longer 2005. Back then blogs were giving Google fits because of how fast and irregularly they updated. Google had to make decisions on how often to index pages. Indexing is expensive, so there’s a tradeoff. Ping servers and blog search engines rose briefly to fill the niche, but Google indexes most popular blogs so often that those blog search engines are no longer much better.
Now, though, we have so much real time content being created that Google and the other engines can’t keep up. Most of this content is on Twitter, but FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg and lots of other services are adding to it, too. The result – more and more people are doing searches on Twitter Search in addition to Google. For me, someone who’s obsessed with news and stuff that’s happening right now, Twitter search is about 25% of my total Internet searches. The ratio keeps going up over time.
That’s where Topsy comes in. It’s not strictly speaking a real time search engine like Scoopler, which we wrote about earlier this month. Topsy is just a search engine. That has a fundamentally new way of finding good results: Twitter users. → Read More
