Blog matching service, PubSub.com, has relaunched their site with a new, more streamlined redesign. PubSub offers a free blog monitoring service based on their proprietary Matching Engine.
Using this technology allows PubSub to match keyword-based queries with the blogs they monitor. These queries return a results page containing blog entries containing the keyword, which is highlighted for the user. According to their About Page:
“The heart of the PubSub service is a powerful, proprietary Matching Engine that makes it possible, for the first time, to match millions of search queries against thousands of new pieces of information every second.
Traditional search stores data and then allows you to find documents within that store of data. PubSub operates by first storing your subscription query, and then watching for new information that matches it. Your query will be checked against every piece of new information passing through our Matching Engine.”
Currently, PubSub monitors 6,612,322 total sources; 3,606,579 of these are active. PubSub is also monitoring 1,246 new items per minute (based on the past 2 hours). Not only do they monitor blogs, PubSub also monitors all SEC filings, via (EDGAR), and over 50,000 Internet newsgroups.
These resource numbers ensures a sizeable pool of information remains available to users. They also improve the chances of keyword queries of having returnable content. For instance, a match of the keyword “google” took about 5-10 minutes and returned a full page’s worth of content.
According to Mary Hodder of Napsterization.org, “PubSub does something interesting that the other blog services don’t do… which is that they don’t collect the data and store it… instead they match the data to the subscription searches and other things they collect and monitor, and then toss it. So they don’t have to worry about structuring it in a database for later.”
This searching of the content that comes through is called “prospective search.”
PubSub also offers a downloadable sidebar that is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
