The Problem
I have a problem. This is a problem that I would guess many other people have. I have access to way too much information. I want less, but I also want the best and newest.
How do I find the best and newest information on any topic? There is a lot of new information everyday. I spend a lot of time searching the internet for quality information on data science. I would love to be able to visit a page and get the latest and greatest information on data science, statistics, bigdata, and machine learning. I would be hoping to get news articles and/or blog posts from the last couple days.
Possible Solutions
Here is a list of products I have seen and why they are not exactly what I am looking for:
- News.me – This site is close. It emails a daily list of top articles, but the articles only come from my twitter followers. The problem is: I may not be following the right people. They did just do an excellent blog series about how people get news, so they may be working on something right now.
- Paper.li – This seems very promising, but not all the content is new. It also only updates 1 or 2 times per day. The slow updates make it difficult to easily and quickly get the latest news. After a few weeks of training your searches and parameters, this might be really good for getting news on a daily basis. The big problem for me is; I have to wait until the next day to see if my search parameters are correct. It is not built to handle ah-hoc queries. Here is the paper I am working on, Data Science 101 News.
- Storify – This is a way to create a collection of information from various social networks. Storify makes it really easy to find social media mentions, but it is not automated and doesn’t save much time. Not that it matters much to me, but the final product is not real pretty.
- Summify – Recently bought by Twitter, so the future is uncertain.
- TweetedTimes – Same problem as News.me. It only generates information based upon people I follow on twitter.
- Google News – This is good for searching, but I think a better one exists or needs to be created. Plus, the Google Privacy issues are a concern here.
Better Solution
This whole concept of filtering/searching/rating news sounds like a data science problem itself. For starters, given a topic, what information has been tweeted the most? What new information has spread the quickest? This approach could be expanded to include Facebook likes and Google +1’s. Also there are numerous other API’s that could be included as well. What I really want is a product that will do this in realtime (or near realtime). I want to be able to enter my search terms and get a list of the most recent quality information pertaining to those terms. I guess what I want is a search engine for recent news (but not Google).
Does anyone know if a product like this exists or is anyone working to build a similar product?
Update: This idea also goes along with Paul Graham’s Ambitious Startup Idea #1 – A New Search Engine.