

Ask HN: review Feedspike - AlexRodriguez

http://www.feedspike.com<p>Feedspike is a news feed aggregator. The entire premise of the site is to feature stories that highlight short-term search trends. The site is an automated service that reads from a continuous stream of syndicated content from major news organizations including CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Reuters, Associated Press, and a myriad of other sources. Top rising search terms from Google are matched with stories from news feeds in real-time automatically. Matches between stories and search terms that have the greatest search volume are placed on the front page. This matching process brings to the surface stories that are becoming increasingly popular. The site is designed mainly for people with a great appetite for real-time information.
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jmonegro
Your algorithm seems like it's well made, though I have not taken a close look
at it's capacities yet. My suggestion: get a better interface. You're
competing with similar websites such as <http://www.newspond.com>

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AlexRodriguez
The ui is really nothing special, but that is by design. We want it to work
with JavaScript off and to be easily crawled so that Googlebot understands the
structure. Spiders and crawlers have yet to catch up with the times and still
have difficulty finding their way through sites that use JavaScript for
navigation.

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jmonegro
Alright, one nice feature would be to build an API so I could, for example,
list content from a certain niche on my website.

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AlexRodriguez
"À la carte" feeds. I'm building this into the site as we speak. There will be
a sign up form to create an account and to get a subscriber id. Subscribers
can define filters. Within a filter is a list of keywords and a schedule
(monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, or real-time) to generate a feed that matches
your keywords. The "API" then would be HTTP GET and the response is RSS.
Simple.

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babyshake
The next logical step would be to show a timeline of how sources pick up a
stories, so you could determine who is getting the best scoops.

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AlexRodriguez
Yes. Several of the feed sources we read from publish a headline with barely
anything to say within the article, then as the info comes in to them, they
republish the same story, each time with minor changes in the headline and
adding more meat to the story. The Associated Press is notorious for this.
That's how they beat everyone else to the punch every time.

