Company: 
What I like best about CustomScoop’s new prospective search/press clippings product is that it is dead simple to use. I spoke to Chip Griffin, CustomScoop’s Chief Innovation Officer and founder, tonight about his new service.
Steve Rubel has been testing CustomScoop and wrote about it earlier today.
CustomScoop has had a successful high end search/clippings product for five years. Pricing ranges from $300 – $1,500 per month and includes lots of bells and whistles.
The CustomScoop Personal product strips out many of those features and enters the market with a free version (allowing one search per account), with a paid version coming soon that allows more searches – the fee will be “substantially less” than the prices charged for their core high end offerings.
CustomScoop is more more, and less, than existing prospective search engines like PubSub. More because they monitor sites not covered by existing prospective search engines (including pages without feeds) and because they offer much more tailored searches (language and country filters, more keyword inclusion/exclusion functionality, etc. Less because they search only 25,000 blogs, whereas blog search engines generally hit the entire blogosphere (tens of millions of blogs).
However, CustomScoop, like Memeorandum (profile), carefully chooses what they consider to be the most important blogs that will supply their customers with pertinent information.
In addition to the 25,000 blogs, CustomScoop also monitors U.S. Online News (5,000 sources), International Online News (2,000 sources), US & EU Government Web Sites (7,000 sources) and Policy Web Sites (1,200 sources).
Search results, as they come in, can be viewed via RSS, twice daily emails or on the CustomScoop website. They’ve snuck in some nice ajax to speed up the review of large result sets.
A comparable service, launched 3 months ago in French, and a week ago in English: http://www.atiki.com
The results can be viewed via rss, email, or website as well…
I’ve been testing CustomScoop for some time and I must say their customer service is very professional and friendly.
Alas, one issue that wasn’t solved was their spiderbot. I noticed a sharp increase of additional traffic coming from 64.49.241.218. Turned out it was their spider robot. It was hitting my server pretty hard and didn’t respect robots.txt at all. Neither was it session aware causing endless crawlings on my PHP-based pages. I e-mailed Bob from CustomScoop about it but never heard back from him.
As a consequence I had to ban their spider is banned from my servers.
The more I use CustomScoop the more I like it. The email updates with clippings are excellent and they are digging up stuff I am not finding elsewhere.
Alexander- I will have someone check into the problem with the spidering of your site.
Thank you Chip. I am in contact with Bob again and it seems you guys are doing a great job in improving your services including the robot.
I appreciate your feedback … we’re always looking to improve the service.
A comparable service, launched 3 months ago in French, and a week ago in English: http://www.kuju.cn
We are starting a comparable buzz marketing company that focuses on small and medium businesses. Right now we are working as an agency, so we find relevant online conversations for our clients and join the conversation. Essentially, we say what you would say but in our own voice. It’s so important to be part of conversations about your company and industry that we are trying to make it more doable for those companies that don’t have the time or knowledge to do it themselves.
We are really excited for the consumer version of our software that will be more cost effective for those companies that want to self serve.
Cari
Buzz.io
Unfortunately, I also have seen the CustomScoop spider completely screw up site stats because it also ignored robots.txt. Since most search engines seem to be able to respect robots.txt I have to question CustomScoop’s services. Possibly they have great customer service but possibly they’re making up for questionable spidering.
spider completely screw up site stats because it also ignored robots.txt. Since most search engines seem to be able to respect robots.txt I have to question CustomScoop’s services. Possibly they have great customer service but possibly they’re maki