PubSub, Rollyo Offer Web Search Services The Big Engines Don't
Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Stret Journal
February 2, 2006; Page B1
In a normal search, you type in a term and the search engine tries to match it against an index of Web sites. It's a one-time process. But in a PubSub search, your search terms stay constant and are continuously matched against a changing stream of data gleaned from PubSub's sources. When a match occurs, even if it's months after you entered your search term, it pops up in PubSub and you're notified.
Tapping Into The Blogosphere
Forbes.com
January 25, 2006
Tracking tools like PubSub allow companies to monitor what's being said about them, their products, their competitors and other topics of importance. The tools include a tracker that looks at the top 1% of bloggers. "Companies should set up 'subscriptions' for keywords and phrases relevant to them," said Wyman.
PubSub's speed unmatched on the Internet
National Post
January 19, 2006
It turned out Wyman had a revolutionary idea and Ismail had business smarts and money. The two created PubSub.com, which has proven it can do what Google cannot: Google searches the past based on your search specifications. PubSub takes your search information, watches for you and alerts you the second the topic you are interested in appears.
Do Blogs Need Structure?
internetnews.com
December 14, 2005
According to Ismail, when people post job listings or items for sale, the data is owned by the Web site where it's posted, rather than by the person who posted it -- and sellers often need to pay to post. Using the schematics provided by the [Structured Blogging] initiative would allow feed syndicators such as PubSub to find such information and offer it to others in aggregated form.
Best Internet Marketing Sites for 2005: Link Popularity
Larry Chase's Web Digest For Marketers
December 6, 2005
This year, Internet marketers finally realized the impact of link popularity on search engine optimization. What this site can do is update you on a daily basis of new sites that have started linking to you. LinkRanks is PubSub's method of measuring the strength, persistence and vitality of links ppearing in the sources that PubSub monitors. It can tell you how influential a particular site is on a particular day and over time. With LinkRanks, users can estimate the reach and influence of a website based on the sites that link to it, which enables one to measure the effectiveness and impact of a link popularity campaign.
Blogs eat into traditional ads for shoppers
Computer World
September 27, 2005
A list of the most "Fashionable Blogs" is the start of an effort by PubSub.com to chart influence and popularity of Web logs catering to special interests and businesses. The first list targets fashion, and has been compiled by a newspaper reporter who ranked what she thought were the top fashion blogs, said Bob Wyman, chief technical officer of PubSub Concepts Inc. If you were an advertiser, and saw which blog was most popular in your product category, you might be interested in using it for your own marketing, he explained.
PubSub Testing Blog Waters With New Ranking System
webpronews.com
September 27, 2005
"In the exceptionally dynamic world of blogging, it doesn't make sense to have rankings that are only updated weekly, monthly, or yearly," said Wyman. "Bloggers want to know who has the popular voice right now - not last month. This is why we've decided to provide fresh daily, 15-day, and 30-day LinkRanks."
Best of the New Web
BusinessWeek
September 26, 2005
Category: Research
New Ranking System Slices, Dices Blogosphere Buzz
eWeek.com
September 26, 2005
PubSub's LinkRanks, released on Monday, measures strength, persistence and vitality of links that appear in the more than 16 million Web feeds the tracking service monitors. LinkRanks differs from competing ranking systems on a number of fronts. Relying on a nightly analysis of Web feeds, PubSub calculates which blogs are the most influential, which are getting the most number of links, and which links come from the most influential sites.
PubSub Concepts' Prospective Search Search Tool for Tomorrow
Computer World
September 12, 2005
The speed of the matching engine, at more than 3 billion matches per second, provides the foundation for an Internet-scale search service.
RSS Goes Corporate
Red Herring
July 18, 2005
"The enterprise is very much a market that we expect to get into," says PubSub CTO Bob Wyman. "We've been thinking about that from day one". Yet he's steering his startup wide of the big deals for now. "We want to assure that our technology is bulletproof before we get there," says Mr. Wyman. "In 12 to 18 months we'll be able to start moving in that space."
Forbes "Best of the Web"
Seattle Times
July 2005
PubSub makes a sidebar for both the Firefox and Internet Explorer Web browsers so you can control your subscriptions while browsing other Web sites. Every aspect of the service is free to use.
BEST: You will be the first person to know about every time that "orangutans finally write Hamlet" or any other obscure subscription that you create is mentioned on a blog or in the news.
Internet bloggers log on to weigh in on Roberts
Seattle Times
July 20, 2005
Services such as PubSub and Technorati let people search for and monitor ongoing Internet discussions. Roberts ranked among the top searches shortly after news of his nomination broke.
PubSub's government feature lists all the Supreme Court justices, along with elected officials, Cabinet members and others. Clicking on a name retrieves the most recent Internet postings that mention the person.
30 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do on the Internet
PC World
May 25, 2005
Want to find out what the bloggers are talking about before it hits the mainstream? Just sign up for PubSub and plug in your search terms. This site crawls more than 9 million blogs, public relations newswires, and SEC filings for relevant entries, and then e-mails you the results. You can also install a sidebar applet inside IE or Firefox and view the results interactively.
Blogs Will Change Your Business
Business Week Online
April 18, 2005
The racket is deafening. But there's loads of valuable information floating around this cafe. Technorati, PubSub, and others provide the tools to listen. While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds.
FeedMeshin'
Blogger Buzz
by Heather Green and Stephen Baker
April 10, 2005
FeedMesh is a project that aims to share sources of feeds (like the ones Blogger produces). The folks over at PubSub are gathering support behind the project so that products which rely on feeds can "focus more on service rather than competing for the number of tracked feeds."
The New Business of Content Alerts
EContent
By Steve Smith
April 2005
At PubSub, you subscribe to a search term or a highly specific type of structured data, like airport delay warnings or SEC filings for particular companies. While traditional engines scour years of retrospective information to match a term, PubSub monitors 8 million blogs, 50,000 newsgroups, and structured sources like Edgar to match your term against new, real-time information. Then the company delivers these matches directly to you via RSS, instant messaging, email, etc. "We do the opposite of search," says co-founder and CTO Bill Wyman.
Tracking the ongoing conversation
PRWeek.com
By Keith O'Brien
April 7, 2005
PubSub is promoting its "prospective search," where the company stores search queries, rather than data like Google does. So a company could create a "search query" based on its brand name, and be told whenever its name is subsequently referenced on a website, blog, or news source, rather than continually going to a search engine and entering in manually. The company makes those results available either via e-mail, browser bar, or RSS feed. In essence, some people don't even Google their name anymore, the technology does it for them.
Monster and the future of blogs
BusinessWeek Online
By Stephen Baker
April 6, 2005
If you tell PubSub that you're looking for a Wharton MBA who's fluent in Mandarin, and such a person posts those details on his or her blog, the search engine makes the match for you--with little need for a job-site intermediary.
New Web-Watching Tools Pique Interest of Investors
The Wall Street Journal Online
By Scott Patterson and Worth Civils
March 29, 2005
PubSub, a closely held news aggregator that provides persistent-search services on its Web site, discovered news of the massive earthquake that struck off the coast of Indonesia minutes before the information appeared on the U.S. Geological Service's own Web site.
What's Next for Google
MIT Technology Review
By Charles H. Ferguson
January 2005
PubSub, a small startup in New York City, has developed a high-performance "matching engine" that monitors online information: if you subscribe to a topic, PubSub will scan data in real time and notify you whenever there is news.
Favorite Topics of 2004
clickz.com
by Gary Stein
December 27, 2004
PubSub.com is a perfect example of this. It monitors tens of thousands of newsfeeds from all of the popular news outlets like Reuters, Yahoo, PRNewswire, ESPN, and thousands of blogs big and small. A user can create a customized newsfeed by entering a keyword or phrase, and PubSub builds a RSS newsfeed for you. You can enter that newsfeed into your favorite newsreader and have pertinent news and information delivered to you.
Inc. magazine selects Rutan as top entrepreneur
The Seattle Times
Fans of PubSub call it a "secret weapon to monitor criticisms in the blogsphere." Plug in a name and PubSub hunts through live feeds of blogs to deliver all the references to that name.
Microsoft, ever sensitive about its own reputation, has been using the tool to gather feedback about its new MSN Spaces blog service. It used that feedback to make some changes to the service, which is still in a test stage.
Welcome to the blogosphere
IT Business.ca
December 3, 2004
...blog, short for Web logs, was reportedly coined in 1999 by Peter Merholz, at the time a creative director at Epinions. Blogging has since been embraced by many big name high-tech firms such as Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., HP Co. and IBM Co. While estimates for the number of blogs in existence are all over the virtual map, at least one source, PubSub Concepts Inc. in New York, has said that it's now tracking over 6.5 million blogs.
Search the Future. Not the past.
Hindustan Times
by Deepak Mankar
November 27, 2004
"If you're not using a tool like PubSub ... you're behind the times," writes Michael Gartenberg. computerworld.com. So what is PubSub, folks? According to Salim Ismail, co-founder of the two-year-old 'matching engine', Google, Yahoo or MSN Search are not PubSub's competition. They deal with the past while PubSub monitors the now and the future by filtering millions of Weblogs, SEC/Edgar filings, Internet newsgroups and press releases. As Gartenberg explains it: "Such monitoring is a simple way to get a rough gauge of what's being said in the marketplace. If there's negative buzz, you want to be able to pick up on the discussions early and get ahead of the issue." "Our competitors are CNN News Alerts and eBay auction alerts," as Ismail elaborates. "The instant we find it, we let you know. We answer the question of when was some company mentioned somewhere, or is there a certain car model available on Auto Trader." PubSub's 'prospective' search engine does not spider or scour the Web. Nor does it not receive feeds from mainstream news sources. " Other search engines collect information and you make a query, you look into the past; it's retrospective," says Ismail. "Instead of storing data, we store the query so when information comes in we can grab it." Try the free-to-use PubSub here: pubsub.com. Eventually though, warns Ismail, "we will have a subscription or advertising model, perhaps adding messages as Google does with its Alerts product".
RSS: Feed Me the Money
InternetNews.com
November 26, 2004
By Susan Kuchinskas
PubSub, a company that lets people subscribe to receive fresh content that matches search-like queries, will insert ads into those feeds. But the company has plans for new ways to make money from feeds.
CTO Bob Wyman said PubSub already is charging companies for private data feeds, such as for very particular kinds of searches or for results restricted to certain users. Next, it plans to provide feeds that treat ads like content.
"Once we've worked out all the technologies for creating feeds, distributing them, finding them, and telling people when a feed has been updated, what we do next is start dealing with things other than text, like job postings, offers to sell, or current weather and earthquake reports," Wyman said. "We'll be treating ads just like content. It will cause a drastic change in the way the system works."
For example, people wanting to rent an apartment won't have to camp out in front of the newspaper office to get a jump on the morning edition's listings, he said. "You'll know the minute the person hits the return key and publishes the ad.
"The really big opportunity to monetize RSS/Atom isn't going to come from advertising in blogs," Wyman continued. "It is going to come from the indirect effect of creating a whole new way for businesses to publish information and communicate with their customers."
The Blogosphere By the Numbers
CLickZ Network
by Rob McGann
November 22, 2004
In an announcement dated November 18, blog-search company PubSub Concepts claims to already monitor over 6.5 million blogs. Perseus Development, meanwhile, estimates by the end of 2004, there will be 10 million blogs, the vast majority already dead.
PubSub pushes the news
CBS.MarketWatch.com
by Frank Barnako
November 19, 2004
Claming to filter millions of Weblogs, SEC/Edgar filings, Internet newsgroups and press releases, PubSub's "matching engine" recognizes new information as soon as it's published and delivers it to subscribers on a Web page or an RSS reader. Salim Ismail, co-founder of the two-year-old firm, said he doesn't see Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO) or MSN (MSFT) Search as the competition -- perhaps because they dealing with the past.
"Our competitors are CNN News (TWX) Alerts and eBay (EBAY) auction alerts," Ismail added. "The instant we find it, we let you know. We answer the question of when was some company mentioned somewhere, or is there a certain car model available on Auto Trader."
Ismail began his career as a software engineer in Europe, later becoming a management consultant for European companies and subsequently running an Internet multimedia company in Toronto. His partner, Bob Wyman, has a background that includes product management for office automation software at Digital Equipment and ActiveX development at Microsoft.
PubSub's search engine does not spider or scour the Web. "We call ours prospective search. Other search engines collect information and you make a query, you look into the past; it's retrospective," Ismail explained. "Instead of storing data, we store the query so when information comes in we can grab it."
PubSub does not receive feeds from mainstream news sources. But he agreed that a licensing agreement with a syndicator could change that. "We'll be adding a lot more content streams quite soon," he said. "We're talking with database owners of things like cars and jobs and roommate searches."
The company's service is free. "Eventually we will have a subscription or advertising model, perhaps adding messages as Google does with its Alerts product," Ismail added.
PubSub now tracking over 6.5 million blogs
The Blog Herald
November 19th, 2004
PubSub Concepts today announced that its "matching engine" at www.pubsub.com is now tracking over 6.5 million blogs, arguably making it the most comprehensive blog monitoring service with some 2 million more blogs tracked than Technorati.
PubSub's "prospective search" matches user requests against new documents as they're published, in real time, with alerts via RSS or through the IM based PubSub Sidebar, now available as a plug-in for the Firefox and Internet Explorer Web browsers. PubSub also covers additional content streams including 50,000 USENET newsgroups, all SEC/EDGAR filings, press releases from major wire services and FAA airport delay alerts.
Interestingly of the 6.5 million blogs tracked by PubSub's matching engine, over 3.5 million are active meaning that new information has recently been posted by the Weblog's author.
Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub Concepts, Inc:"We believe that PubSub is currently tracking more active blogs than any other service--We also have an extremely active user base that relies on PubSub subscriptions to stay informed. On average, we process over two million entries each day across all our services - over 80,000 entries per hour. We expect the number of blogs to continue growing at an explosive rate and we've built a massively scalable system in anticipation of that growth."
Business Weblogs Are Double-Edged
Computer World
by Michael Gartenberg
November 15, 2004
Know what's being said about your company on other people's weblogs. This is a no-brainer. If you're not using a tool like PubSub or Feedster to see what's being said about you and to monitor your company and brands, you're behind the times. Such monitoring is a simple way to get a rough gauge of what's being said in the marketplace. If there's negative buzz, you want to be able to pick up on the discussions early and get ahead of the issue.