Trapit Aims To Be Your Search “Personal Assistant”

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 [...]


Bing Gets More Personal With Adaptive Search

Bing has announced at SMX East today a new personalization feature named adaptive search. It seems a lot like Google's previous query feature but supposedly, it goes well beyond just the previous query. Bing said the "more you search, the more Bing can learn" and thus adapts the search results for YOU based on your past searches - not just your immediate previous search. Here is a video that explains it, we hope to have more information on this new feature soon: Video: Adapting Search to You Note, it is rolling out slowly over the next few days in the US. Stefan from Bing add [...]


Walmart Buys Former Search Engine Kosmix To Power Social And Mobile Shopping

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 [...]


Search Technology Behind iPad Magazine “Zite”

Discovery Engine Worio has taken its search technology and reinvented itself as an iPad magazine along the lines of Flipboard. Called Zite (after Zeitgeist), the iPad app uses the same search and machine learning capabilities developed at the British Columbia-based Worio to create a personalized magazine that "gets smarter" as you use it. (CEO Ali Davar says the company's servers "are getting crushed" right now because of the publicity the app has received.) It starts by taking Twitter and, curiously, Google Reader feeds -- though not Facebook because of the "noise" in that feed -- to creat [...]


Hunch Tweaks Home Page, Focuses On Recommendations

Hunch has announced what it calls a "streamlined and simplified" home page, but the changes really reflect a slight change in focus, too. When the site launched last year, we referred to Hunch as a "personal decision maker;" Hunch itself used the term "decision engine." The new home page, though, presents a change of emphasis; logged-in users are immediately presented with a group of recommendations. The previous home page was more of an activity stream that seemed geared toward funneling users into existing decision topics. The difference between decision-making and recommending [...]


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