[nostrademons]

Cross between an RSS-reader and a search engine - it lets you subscribe to a topic instead of a site, so that you don't have to manage hundreds of subscriptions, and if a new discussion pops up somewhere on the web that's relevant to your interests, it'll find it and let you know. As forums get boring or off-topic and new ones spring up, it adjusts automatically, so you don't need to do the "Does anyone know of other places on the web like X?" dance.

Still under development, but drop me an e-mail if you (or anyone else reading this) is interested in beta-testing. I'm starting out e-mail first, so the initial UI is just that you get a daily digest of links & snippets to threads related to your interests.

[real-hacker]

Are you considering adding sentiment analysis/clustering as one feature? You know, to let people read about different opinions, most often, they only need to read one post in each cluster.

[Gigablah]

Ah, so something like ElasticSearch percolater queries but applied to the web.

[nostrademons]

Yep, pretty much. The percolater queries are fairly handy in this instance, and one of the things we didn't really have at Google.

[exikyut]

I just read https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21536599/what-does-perco..., and was strongly reminded of Google Wave's "search for documents that haven't been created yet, and they show up when they appear" functionality.

Without trying to get too much off track, I gotta say that it would be so nice to be able to use the original theme data used in Wave (very obviously sans branding). Wave In A Box is... blech, in terms of design, I have to admit.

[Aissen]

Google News topic search has an RSS. How is your product better ?

[nostrademons]

Google News concentrates mostly on news sites, which have an economic incentive to generate content that emotionally grabs you and spreads virally (i.e. clickbait). I get the sense that people are getting fairly outraged at all the outrage in the MSM & popular blog-based sites - I know I am - and are fatiguing of that. I'm concentrating on forums, blogs, and other user-generated content, which has no economic incentive to reach millions of people and so can be both more authentic and more informative.

For example, my current video game obsession is Factorio, which has about 200,000 users and will likely never appear in a major news story, because it's un-economical for a news outlet to write a story that has an audience of at most 200,000. Despite this, there are 4 active forums dedicated to it, which generate a few hours worth of interesting reading each day. This content is a lot more interesting to me than anything that appears on Google News, but it's a lot less interesting to the millions of other readers of Google News. But the beauty of computers is that we can match content up to precisely the users that care about it.

[exikyut]

> But the beauty of computers is that we can match content up to precisely the users that care about it.

In theory. I often wonder about pathologically impossible-to-query statistics like "who is snoring the loudest right now?" "show me a global map of everyone waking up right now (and a graph tracking how many people are waking up per second); and provide a second-to-second pinpoint of the person who feels the most refreshed." "what is the single most relevant set of webpages for this highly obscure, domain-specific query?" etc.

Heh, it sometimes takes me actual effort to calm myself down about the fact that, beyond a certain threshold, we literally cannot collect enough entropy (data) to direct a database to the most relevant results - and that we similarly won't connect users to the data they're most interested in, beyond that point.

I do totally get what you mean though.

[Aissen]

Very interesting. Indeed, Google News is silent on english-content on Factorio. But then how is your product better at finding specific forums ? Furthermore, why wouldn't I just add this particular forum's RSS to my reader?