Often, one compares Pugmarks to the likes of Flipboard, Prismatic, Zite, Pulse, Feedly etc. Almost all of them promise personalization, and a very small bootstrapping time. Some like Zite and the recent Lumi even tell you what they’ve figured out about you. But I’d like to ask. How fast can they react from there?
Current day news engines take topic modeling and personalization seriously. Perhaps, a bit too seriously. They bet early on an architecture that does a lot of data mining, to populate articles into thousands of well defined topics and categories. When a new user signs up, and they “figure” him out based on his taste, the news engine characterizes the user into a certain “archetype”. Its a beautiful system, and a dream for every NLP, IR and ML practitioner. They dream of doing clustering, classification, semantic indexing, topic modeling and what not. In this architecture, there’s so much heavy lifting of data – that somethings got to give. Most of these systems become largely offline and batch processing systems that find it hard to react to a user’s ever changing tastes.
News is about fast reactions. Awareness is about knowing what matters now. Can these systems react fast enough? Not yet – and the central reason is some of the architectural decisions they’ve taken. They’ve designed the product as a stream processing engine, or a batch processing engine – largely on systems like mapreduce that have high through put. These engines cannot react to what you are doing now – fast enough, since they are simply not architected like a search engine.
What are the news search engines you can recall? When you’ve had to search the news where did you go? Google – and went into its News index.
One of our best users, an analyst at GigaOm Pro, made an interesting observation. He uses all the usual suspects among the news products. Flipboard, Feedly, and he recently came in touch with Lumi. He noticed something about Pugmarks that stands out. In his own words, “You can drill down from anywhere”.
Say, you are reading something now – or even better, have just found out about Lumi.do. What do you want to know now?
- What is the general reporting on this site?
- Is there someone you know, who knows about this?
- How’s the recent reporting been about this?
- What else is related to this?
- Who’s behind this product?
Yes, you have a thirst for a lot of information. Pugmarks can quench this thirst, or at least promises to make a sound attempt.
Right when you visit the site, Pugmarks converts the page into a query, and searches your circles of interests for anything that is relevant. While it does this, it figures out the broad themes that people have written about your context. A strip on top of the browser gives you the key updates. You can pull it down to explore for more. Right there, you have the themes behind your context, the people in your circles who might know something about this context, experts or resources you can rely on for trusted information – everything accessible.
This is “drill down from anywhere”.
Pugmarks can do this because its not a news engine. Its an awareness engine – that has considered what constitutes awareness for people.
- Awareness is about knowing information that matters to you right now.
- Awareness is about knowing people you know, who are conversant with what you are doing now.
- Awareness is about getting trusted information.
Pugmarks is like social search thats woven into a news/awareness context. People are always the centre of your searches. You get to know stuff through people you can trust. Or you get to know people you should trust – based on what you are doing. When we built our search engine, we put people in the middle – literally. Our index – or reverse index – for the initiated – is not the traditional key -> documents map. We’ve put people in the middle there, and made it key -> people -> documents. This allows us to bring the best content for you, prioritized by people you know and trust. We can also efficiently find out the people who you should trust based on what you are doing.
With Pugmarks you can drill down from anywhere – and you dont have to stop using any of the other products.