Topicle: A Unique Application of Google Site Search - SendMeRSS
Posted by elveston priory at 6:41 pm
Human-powered search is seeing a resurgence in the form of many new startups out there recently, and the most recent entrant to the market is Topicle, an offering from former Google Product Manager Steffen Mueller. The company was started last fall and just went live earlier today.
The system is fairly simple, interesting and relies heavily on the backbone of Google custom search. The system has shades of the Mahlolo, Knol, Wikipedia and Squidoo rolled in, but with a whole lot less work involved for the user generating the content. Instead of writing articles and compiling sources, you instead list a set of URLs relevent to the keywords you’re creating a ‘Topicle’ for.
I created a test Topicle for the keyword ‘Rizzn’, and included both my MySpace pages, and the page here at Mashable that lists all my posts on the site. The first time I created it, the URLs I entered didn’t show up, but when I went back to edit it, I was able to successfully get my URLs to stick (they’re still working out some of the bugs, apparently). As long as the URLs you enter are indexed in Google, though, you’ll have no problem creating a Topicle that ends up being an effective means of indexing content centered around a certain topic.
There are shortcomings, though. One of the Topicles I first started was Highschool English, and it was very difficult to get anything to come up from the search that I remembered from High School English (things like the Great Gatsby and 1984) despite the fact that there were a ton of Wikipedia articles indexed on the topic. Furthermore, the site lacks an overall search function - you must select your desired topic from a browse list at present, and then search within the smaller subset of indexed pages.
Still, from a business standpoint, anyone that has ever created a site rich with content, and has a well used search function can attest to the fact Google powered site search can be quite a decent profit center. If Topicle can keep their costs down, they’ll definitely have the budget to hone the site’s functionality to something quite useful.