Congrats, Vip and Rishab! Want to talk a little more about this and what makes it unusual? :-)
Udhay http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/topsy-search-launches-retweets-are-the-new-currency-of-the-web/ Topsy Search Launches: ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web by Michael Arrington on May 26, 2009 New search engine Topsy, which has been in stealth development for three years, launches, well, now. Before Google, search engines like AltaVista determined relevance based on how well a web page matched the query. Then came Google, which views the web as a network of documents. Today, all search engines analyze linking behavior around the web. When a web page is linked to a lot, it’s given more influence than other pages competing for attention around the same topics/keywords. Jeff Jarvis summed it all up nicely in 2005 “In this new world, links are currency. Links grant authority. Links build branding. Links equal value.” There’s lots more to it, but the notion that links create value is what drives Internet search. Well, it’s no longer 2005. Back then blogs were giving Google fits because of how fast and irregularly they updated. Google had to make decisions on how often to index pages. Indexing is expensive, so there’s a tradeoff. Ping servers and blog search engines rose briefly to fill the niche, but Google indexes most popular blogs so often that those blog search engines are no longer much better. Now, though, we have so much real time content being created that Google and the other engines can’t keep up. Most of this content is on Twitter, but FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg and lots of other services are adding to it, too. The result - more and more people are doing searches on Twitter Search in addition to Google. For me, someone who’s obsessed with news and stuff that’s happening right now, Twitter search is about 25% of my total Internet searches. The ratio keeps going up over time. That’s where Topsy comes in. It’s not strictly speaking a real time search engine like Scoopler, which we wrote about earlier this month. Topsy is just a search engine. That has a fundamentally new way of finding good results: Twitter users. The 30 million or so Twitter users are an army of little content-finding machines. Topsy says those users are sending tens of thousands of unique links per day to interesting things around the Internet. Some of those users have more influence than others. And some links are sent by lots of Twitter users, others just sent once. Those links, combined with the information in the Twitter message itself, is what Topsy uses as the basis of its search engine. And the results are…amazing. <snip, more at the URL> -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
