Topix.net improves
Topix.net has upgraded its software and, among other things, changed its homepage story picking algorithm.
Replacing the previous "section samples" homepage is a blended rollup of all the major stories occurring within the past 24 hours. Among other things, the new algorithm attempts to determine the accurate time of the story, as opposed to how recently the story appears on the Web and was fetched by the crawler. This is an attempt to address the problem other aggregators encounter, where day-old stories occassionally appear on the hoomeage with recent time stamps.
The algorithms also use new "editorial rules" to attempt to chose the most interesting stories, rather than just the ones most news sites are leading with. Topix.net's goal was to create a compelling news front page that's different from other news aggregators and online news sites.
"We've put a lot of effort into improving how it chooses stories," Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta said in an e-mail to CyberJournalist.net. "Our goal is to automate selection of interesting and important stories from the widest number of sources. Obviously human editing will provide judgement that computers can never replace, but given the torrent of info pouring off the net, automation is needed to manage the flow."
Other new features include:
• Flyout navigation on the upper left tracks recent Topix.net pages that you've visited.
• Full Coverage sections under major stories. Big stories with multiple unique articles now have a "Full Coverage" link beneath them. This lets users view multiple articles about the same story.
• Email alerts are available for every one of topix.net's 150,000 topic categories.
• Live Feed on the front page. These are raw headlines coming off of the news crawler. No categorization or ranking has been applied, other than profanity and automated QA filtering.
• New search interface. RSS feeds are also now available on the search results page, so you can get a feed of your favorite search.
• Press releases have been added to the business industry and company coverage pages
• Additional sources now crawled: now over 7,000.
• All of Topix.net's 150k RSS feeds have been upgraded to RSS 2.0. (Backward compatibility is available for sites that need the former 1.0 feed).
Aug 02, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(0)
Discussion
0 comments about 'Topix.net improves'Post a comment
Site Map
