Vik Singh of Yahoo’s BOSS team has just launched a new search engine called TweetNews that mashes up Yahoo News stories with some of the hottest topics on Twitter. The result is a news engine that is significantly more timely than common news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo’s standard news site.
In his blog post describing the new release, Singh explains that sorting Yahoo News results by the “recent” category ranks them by the time at which they were published, which is a poor measure of relevance. Some news sites try to measure the relevance of breaking news by looking at how many news publications have covered the same story, but this doesn’t work well for breaking news, as more stale stories tend to rise to the top because they have more related articles.
To combat this, Singh’s mashup tries to use recent Twitter tweets to measure which topics are breaking, and then links to relevant stories gathered from Yahoo News. The site is very barebones at the moment (I’d like to see a homepage detailing the hottest news stories and matching tweets), but it’s a great showcase for BOSS and the power of Twitter. It only took Singh 100 lines of code, and it’s open source. From his blog post:
There’s something very interesting here … Twitter as a ranking signal for search freshness may prove to be very useful if constructed properly. Definitely deserves more exploration – hence this service, which took < 100 lines of code to represent all the search logic thanks to Yahoo! BOSS, Twitter’s API, and the BOSS Mashup Framework.
To sum up, the contributions of this service are: (1) Real-time search + freshness (2) Stitching social commentary to authoritative sources of information (3) Another (hopefully cool) BOSS example.
The code is packaged for general open consumption and has been ported to run on App Engine (which powers this service actually). You can download all the source here.
Dang “This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.”
It’s working now. Google raised the quota limits (according to Vik’s blog).
Hi Jason:
I believe his last name is Singh.
Yahoo! News search does sort by relevance (which seems to take into account time). Singh was saying if you click “date” on Y! News search to get the latest results it will sort by timestamp and take a hit in relevance.
Cheers
Already over quota on Google App Engine
I believe his name is SINGH not SIGH. Great journalism btw.
It’s running for me now. I just tried again 5 minutes later.
I think Google temporarily bans it if the requests per second is high.
Unfortunately they are over their quota, great post and thanks for the heads up.
awesome, now give us a way to monetize BOSS already.
Hmm… Not giving me any results. E.g., try obama.
I think that’s App Engine crapping out because it worked for me a couple minutes ago. Just wait for the Techcrunch onslaught to finish and try again. It’s pretty cool.
Another good example is the query “speech”
compare yahoo or google with this engine.
Vik keeps creating interesting mashups between code releases. I’m waiting for the next inspiration to hit.
Next step of social news?
love it!
Is it Open Source ? Can If that is the case can I also have the code base to twitter and to Yahoo search ?
Why extend an application (Share Crop) for a company that will give you noting back in return for your efforts. Twitter and Yahoo are not Open Source so they can cut you off at anytime.
If you are an Open Source Developer or Content creator (If you are a member of either service you are a content creator) you should not use Facebook or Twitter.
By using Facebook or Twitter you are essentially raising the value of their companies and applications. Both Facebook and Twitter are closed source content silos that do not allow you to control the content that you create. Neither Facebook or Twitter put the content creator/members at the top of their pyramids when thinking about revenue models. Each of these companies puts their Companies first above the members and communities that have given them value and money.
If you are a developer you may be able to make some money by creating applications for Facebook or Twitter ; but I do not believe that Facebook or Twitter will ever allow your application to eat into their user base or their revenue. Because they are both closed source companies that have the ability to literally cut you off by changing the code/api or by using their proprietary knowledge to build an application that you can not possibly compete with. As a coder understand that when you build and extend Facebook or Twitters propitiatory platforms that you undermine the longevity of the Open Internet.
Content owners and Developers do not help these closed source companies (Twitter and Facebook) in their goal of creating another closed source content trap that will extract hundreds of Millions on dollars from their member and developer communities and give nothing back in return.
“Create more value than you capture.” – Tim O’Reilly
Love the app. We built a similar demo about a month ago, using our PostRank API (which includes twitter amongst many other metrics). Give it a try:
http://boss.pos...o&type=news
I’ve rebuilt the app available on a non-appengine backend with a few tweeks. It’s available here:
http://zipon.com