persistent search is just the start…
On a few occasions I’ve been asked how Filtrbox is different from persistent search. The question is typically poised immediately following a brief discussion of what we are up to and how people and businesses will consume our service. Not surprisingly it’s the tech-savvy folks that already know the content monitoring or attention economy industry pretty well that ask the question.
For the non-experts, persistent search is the ability to save a search after you’ve run it, and have the software re-run the search on your behalf on an ongoing basis. This can be really useful in many cases as it’s a time-saver and can help you find items the search missed previously. You can even subscribe via RSS to your search results to stay abreast of the new content. Persistent search is step forward for search in general, and pretty soon we’ll see more features exposed in search engines and browsers that take advantage of the capabilities. Fundamentally, you still need to know what you are looking for (you have to enter a keyword or combination of keywords), and it is up to you to analyze the search results for the data you want. How this technology is applied to specific areas is where it gets interesting…
Filtrbox has elements of persistent search built into it, as does any content monitoring or tracking application that has to constantly look for new articles in published content, but where things start to differ is what the system does with the data it gathers and how that information is filtered, sorted, validated and presented to the user. Searching, or re-searching, is only one step of a multi-step process and by itself is not sufficient. In order to improve our ability to handle the content explosion happening online, the other half of the process is critical. Filtering, packaging, delivery…