Rollyo founder Dave Pell is taking another stab at the search engine space with his just-launched news/media aggregator Addictomatic.
The site can act as both an RSS search engine for user-submitted queries, or a constantly updated newsfeed for pre-defined topics including politics, gossip, and music. Addictomatic pulls headlines and images from a number of RSS feeds and presents them in small boxes similar to those found on iGoogle and Netvibes. Stories are drawn from a number of big-name blogs, news, and media sites, but there is currently no option to add your own favorite site to the list (though there are plans to add this feature).
Addictomatic sports a very clean and manageable layout - a necessity given the amount of information it throws at you. Users can add, remove, and rearrange the location of each headline feed, and layouts can be saved by simply creating a bookmark. The site is also offering plugins to integrate Addictomatic into browser search fields.
My biggest issue with the site is the apparent lack of any kind of relevance algorithm. Everything comes straight from RSS feeds based on your search query, without any kind of filter to weed out bogus results. This means that a search for “James Bond” yields stories on investing and Pac-10 sports (though to be fair, the majority of the headlines usually have at least partial relevance). That said, Addictomatic does a remarkably good job at presenting vast amounts of information without becoming overwhelming.
At this point, Addictomatic provides a great way to get a quick overview of a topic. The inclusion of topical pages also makes Addictomatic something of a destination site, particularly for users who prefer not to manage their own RSS feeds to keep up on current events.
Competitors to Addictomatic include popurls and Alltop. Dave Pell’s last project, Rollyo, is a custom search engine that lets users specify which sites should be included during a search.
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Coverage of this site by TechCrunch makes my think that web 2.0 has jumped the shark. Great, another site that aggregate feeds and perfoerms search via APIs, with content presented in a Netvibes layout. How original. Who cares?
If nothing else, the site is notable because of Dave Pell’s involvement.
i’m like totally missing my crunchbase photo here
The problem is that the RSS feeds don’t appear to be tailored to the terms you use. They’re the same feeds, just from places that can customize their feeds to keywords, like Google News, del.icio.us, etc.
It’d be very interesting to see this sort of site actually presenting feeds specifically relevant to the topic. So, for example, if I put in “Ruby on Rails” I might get some Rails blogs, Ruby blogs, and some of these meta feeds. If I put in “Microsoft Mesh” I’ll get the meta / search feeds but also any official blogs on the topic. This would take some human work to organize, but I suspect the top 90% of searches could be covered very quickly with some keyword analysis.
I think there’s a middle ground between Addictomatic’s automatic approach and the Alltop approach where only a handful of subjects are covered but the feeds are hand picked.
>> If nothing else, the site is notable because of Dave Pell’s involvement.
Jason, no criticism of your writing intended and dont know anything about Pell.
>> i’m like totally missing my crunchbase photo here
Too bad, you aint Dave Pell.
This is the worst elevator pitch of all time. Clearly I need to take every half-assed idea I have out to the Valley and get some VC funding!
Nice name
“Competitors to Addictomatic include popurls and Alltop.”
and the other 50 billion news aggregation websites out there.
News is News
Agreed, great name. Brings to mind the slang term for a female-to-male sex change operation, but still a great name.
i think addictomatic rocks. fun stuff. great layout. not entirely precise but whatever
Here is a free tip to the next rss news aggregator; Stop trying to be everything to everyone and just design and optimize on a per niche basis. Typing a keyword for a topic brings totally irrelevant results. Automatic fail. http://www.thenintendo.com . While it is a niche, it does pick up the best sites on topic and presents the info in a much more digestible format then using the glorified ‘news blocks’ popurls clones.
How long before aggregators are being aggregated?
@Peter Cooper: that is what we are doing with whatsupinruby.com, only the app does all the reading for you. Monitor the conversation rather than aggregating the feeds. Much more to come.