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Keegy: Geo-relevance rankings

Keegy has an interesting concept: Its a website that serves up “relevant” news by correlating what other people from your same geographic region clicked. Localization is a good buzzword to be touting at the moment - Keegy’s execution seems to be confused on a number of levels.

1. Geography? Arguably, when it comes to web browsing, geographic location is a poor basis for relevance correlation to begin with. Clickstream behaviour is motivated by interests, which in internet land are loosely if at all correlated with location. i.e.: A gamer living in Winnipeg is more interested in international “gaming” news, not news that other people from Winnipeg may have enjoyed. It seems to me that location should be one spectrum of correlation - not the only one.

2. Transparency - Its unclear how Keegy relates my location to the content it serves up. At what level does the relevancy calculation take place? Province? City? Country? Can I change it? Given that there doesn’t appear to be a way to get an un-modified view of the site, I need to know “how” my world view is being generated.

3. Ranking - imagine if the Digg homepage didn’t tell you the number of diggs any given story had gotten. Would you find the page more or less trustworthy as a news source? Just how relevant are results are on Keegy is currently a mystery - i.e.: how much clickstream data is the page that Keegy served up based on? What I want is a “digg equivalent” score for each story that clarifies its ranking: “Viewed by 28 Winnipegers, 76 Manitobas, and 891 Canadians” would be a nice summary.

The Keegy press release helpfully offers this non-explanation:

“In a personalized news service users interact with the site and their activity anonymously generates statistics for each city/country. Using this information, an artificial intelligence algorithm ranks the posts for relevance according to a visitor’s location and the stories and home pages are edited automatically every minute.” [from Press Release]

4. Don’t Confuse Yourself with a Search Engine: For some reason, Keegy creates and maintains its own index of content blogs, fundamentally limiting the depth and breadth of Keegy-served content to its own crawl. Why not tie Keegy in with a browser extension and let users roam the net? I imagine that would create a much more valuable and interesting clickstream, and keeping only reasonably correlated data (across a given geographic user body) would eliminate “outlier” content.

In a nutshell, Keegy seems like a half-implemented slice of a larger project. Err, fortunately Keegy is “…closing seed capital stage on November 21th. and starting their first round of investment next October.” [from Press Release] Well, good luck to you. In a crowded market of social discovery services, I don’t think Keegy has the spark to go big.

aggregator, digg, keegy, news, social stumbleupon

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Recommendations & Discovery are the New Search

Recommendations and discovery are becoming more and more important - to the internet in general, but also specifically as a complement, supplement, and (gasp!) replacement to core search activities.

The big question I’m wondering is how long it will be before a “Search” box appears on the StumbleUpon home page - leveraging their human derived index to allow for narrowly focused, highly relevant stumbling.

In one sense, the rise of “R&D” can be seen as a response to Google’s dominance - services like StumbleUpon, Medium, and so on offer entrepreneurs and investors a way around Google to influence people’s web-usage patterns.

In another sense, however, the evolution of R&D is a natural consequence of technology’s march. R&D services are fundamentally search engines: they just use a different class of algorithm (clickstream correlation), and accept queries in a less-structured fashion. Effectively, R&D services are another point in the spectrum of human vs. algorithmic search options: Google pins down one end, while Mahalo, ChaCha, and even Yahoo! Answers compete at the other. StumbleUpon and their ilk exist in the center blending the human element (clickstreams) with the machine (automated aggregation and analysis).

Continue Reading…

calacanis, chacha, delicious, google, mahalo, medium, search, stumbleupon yahoo

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The Google Roundup - big week

Many of these announcements have been sort of under the radar, but overall, Google has had quite the week:

1. GooglePoint: Google pulled the powerpoint trigger, completing the bulk of their anti-microsoft suite with the purchase of java-tool-maker Tonic.
2. Google Vs. StumbleUpon: After eBay’s questionable purchase of StumbleUpon, a pouty sounding Google fired back by adding dice to the Google toolbar - a button that apparently taps similar functionality as StumbleUpon’s.
3. Froogle is Getting Some Attention: Google Product Search. About time. Froogle was one of Google’s earliest branches out from core search, and has languished more or less since launch, getting demoted of the front page, and generally wasting away.
4. Charts: Google fleshed out the Sheets document type with charting - finally. EDIT: Zoli does charts.
5. RSS API: Google’s added an RSS/Atom handler to their search API. I haven’t really had a chance to dig into this, but its sounds a lot like the server-side functionality provided by MagpieRSS will now be available in JS.

api, atom, excel, google, magpie, microsoft, rss, stumbleupon tonic

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TechCrunch - eBay to buy StumbleUpon

Techcrunch tells the tale: eBay is snapping up cult-pheno StumbleUpon. Reasons?

I’m thinking eBay will act quickly to deploy stumbleupon technology as an eBay discovery service, providing a means for people to find more auctions that they will want to bid on - a new layer to eBay search. Certainly the eBay API has them primed for integration.

Still - seems like stumbleupon could have been acquired by a group with a more media-centric discovery model - I think that’s just my expectations at work though, as the more I think about it, the more eBay would be a good way to monetize stumble IP.

ebay, stumbleupon, techcrunch techmeme

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