Archive for November, 2008
Search Engine Toolkit gets a new portal
We have a new home for our News Search API – the Search Engine Toolkit product portal. Now customers can login and get full search API details, all the search filters and output options (close to 30), along with example search integrations, a gallery and online FAQs and support.
Wondering what a Search Engine Toolkit does?
Skipping the smart-but-useless-Alec answer (“well that all depends on what you do with it….”), it basically gives you access to a live news search engine and a set of tools that let you control and focus the search results. There’s no frontend UI as such, just HTTP calls and RSS returns. That makes it inherently flexible, and how you integrate all depends on how and where you want your users to access and view news headlines (ok, back to smart Alec after all).
For example, the news search on our free feeds page uses the SET – it’s just a search box with a couple of filter options. Our own Newsdesk uses it too – here it’s powering a full enterprise application. Moreover client BusinessWeek on their part uses it to power news headlines in their Business Exchange network, while news prediction site HubDub uses it to automatically match headlines to users’ questions (see `related news` on this page). Media analysis company MediaMiser take the toolkit to integrate Moreover news in their enterprise service.
In a nutshell, there really is no set way for deploying news content, so the toolkit’s constructed to work to your scope and scale, and fit with any design.
(oh did we mention OpenCalais integration coming to a search engine toolkit near you soon??)
Add comment November 27, 2008
UGC Update: Blogging platforms
Last Thursday we added <generator> and <publishingPlatform> tags to the UGC Metabase XML. It lets us list out feeds by blogging platform, and help customers organise the data accordingly. The <generator> tag gets the raw generator value from the original RSS, which <publishingPlatform> then consolidates under their common platform name, e.g. Wordpess, Blogger etc.. At the moment we’ve marked out 150 blogging platforms (some pretty obscure ones out there…. ). The top 25 show in the White List:
1 comment November 18, 2008
