Company: CustomScoop
Launched: in private beta
Location: New Hampshire

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.