Somewhere between the "precision of search and the serendipity of social media" lies Trapit. Trapit is a "personal discovery engine" based on the same underlying technology that forms the core of Apple's Siri virtual assistant. From the outside, however, it looks something like a cross between StumbleUpon and Flipboard or Zite. Co-founders Gary Griffiths and Hank Nothhaft are quick to rebut each of those comparisons by pointing to Trapit's underlying technology as the differentiator. Users input keywords or entire URLs and create "traps," which are content modules drawing upon approxima [...]

Related Topics: Apple: Siri | Search Engines: News Search Engines | Search Engines: Personalized Search Engines

A new report on tablet ownership and usage, from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, finds that 11 percent of US adults own tablets (mostly iPads) and 77 percent use them daily. Beyond this 53 percent of tablet owners consume news on these devices on a daily basis. The report focuses primarily on news consumption on tablets. However we know from numerous other studies that tablet owners are also highly engaged shoppers as well. Tablet owners are more educated, affluent and employed than the general US population. And they're using tablets to access news instea [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Engines: News Search Engines | Stats: General | Stats: Popularity

The recent trend for search technologies that aren't or weren't able to compete directly as search engines is to become newsreaders or content discovery vehicles. This is not meant to demean the technology or the companies involved but simply to acknowledge the difficulty of competing in the search market. This search-to-content discovery pivot has been made before by Worio, which became Zite, and Taptu, which also became went from being a mobile search provider to a personalized newsreader. Now comes Evri, which already was a "content discovery engine," with a bunch of mobile apps. But [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: News Search Engines

The search technology behind failed social search engine Worio became the guts of the successful Zite app, which was recently acquired by CNN. Similarly Taptu, which began as a mobile search engine in the pre-iPhone era (2006), did almost the identical thing and is hoping to follow Zite's lead. Originally Taptu was a search engine for feature phones and low-end smartphones. It then morphed into a search engine for the "touch friendly" mobile web, indexing only sites that looked good touch-screen smartphones. But as smartphone apps proliferated and gained traction, and as Google came to domi [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Search Engines: News Search Engines

For those who follow search it was initially one of those "WTF moments": Walmart acquiring erstwhile Google challenger Kosmix. However AllThingsD reports that the price was $300 million-plus vs. $55 million raised. So the founders and investors get a seemingly nice exit. Kosmix will now become part of the newly established "@WalmartLabs." When it launched in 2006 Kosmix was building a better search engine that organized results by category and added numerous filters allowing users to drill down for more relevance and control. Below is an early Kosmix search results page (via DailyTech [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Health & Medical Search Engines | Search Engines: News Search Engines | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Search Engines: Personalized Search Engines | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines