Better Integration for Search

Searching for information is a pretty standard exchange: you type in your query, and the search engine gives you a list of links.  That’s all well and good, and most of the time you find what you’re looking for.

But where do those links come from?  Google, Yahoo, and other search engines crawl the web, following links they find on web pages to other web pages.  All the links you see in your search results look the same, no matter where they came from.  What about the context?  Where did that link come from?  What are people saying about it?  If there was a long conversation about a link on Digg.com, wouldn’t you like to know?

Integrating Services to Search

Pressflip is an interesting search application because it’s not Google - our users save searches and get results over time, as they are published.  Because it’s not Google, it doesn’t work like Google: Google is like a librarian who can find what you need to know, but Pressflip is like a guy who watches a news ticker and hands you what you’re looking for as it’s written.

Because it works differently, we can do some really neat things with the stuff Pressflip reads.

We have been working for the past two months, changing our backend architecture.  We’ve been changing it from a plain-vanilla saved search application to a platform for saved search applications. This means that when we find a silo of information, we can write an application using the platform to read that information in context.

For example, one of the applications we’ve developed on this platform is a specialized reader for the social media site reddit.com.  If a link gets upvoted to the front page on reddit and it matches one of your saved searches, we think it should be given special treatment.  Maybe you’d like to upvote it on reddit.  Maybe you want to go join the conversation.  Now you can.

More to Come

We’re launching five applications today:

• Digg: search over top stories from digg.com
• Reddit: search over top stories from reddit.com
• Topix: type in your ZIP code, and Pressflip will search local news stories from topix.com
• Twitter: enter your Twitter username and password, and Pressflip will search links that people you follow post to Twitter
• Fark: search over top stories from fark.com

Think of an application as a source you want Pressflip to read for you.  Each source has some nuanced detail, so using the platform, Pressflip will tailor the result to the source it came from, and your feedback (by either reading a story or flipping it) will work just as it always did.

There are more applications in the works, so stay tuned.