(Annette Moser-Wellman)

There are a myriad of search engines trying to unseat Google. At the same time, there are a handful of search engines that are trying to grab the white space that Google is missing. One of these complementary players is Scoopler.com. Scoopler is focusing on organizing all the real-time content on the web and making it searchable. What do they mean by real-time? I talked with their Founder Dilan Jayawardane to figure it out.


How are you different from your everyday search engine?

We are indexing content from Twitter, Flickr and Digg, and making it discoverable. We look for trending topics. We are creating a system that is able to detect any newsworthy event that happens out there and build a custom portal so that people can find all the relevant information in one place.


Who is your target audience?

At the moment it's news junkies - people who use Twitter a lot and people who are interested in conversation that goes on Twitter following a news event. We are expanding to those who interact in real-time with a news event live on TV. Increasingly, people are watching television with a laptop and want to interact on Scoopler in real-time.

We get about 2,000 uniques a day, but it fluctuates depending on what's going on in the stratosphere. For example, when Michael Jackson died, our traffic went over the roof and the Iran election is a great example because we had all these photos and people tweeting from Iran and all over the world. We can get massive amounts of traffic, and then it plateaus when there isn't anything exciting going on.


I would imagine that news organizations are interested in Scoopler.

We've been talking to several big media companies and they are very interested in exploring how to make their web content more attractive to their audiences. We can provide sanitized Twitter feeds that screen out the noise and retain the real feedback to the news.


How did you come up with the idea?

I had a lot of Twitter followers and it was hard to keep up with the important content because there was so much noise. I was wondering why there wasn't a service that looks for more interesting content on Twitter and highlights it. And then news started breaking out on Twitter. For example, one of the earliest cases was when NASA found ice on Mars and a scientist tweeted it from inside the lab. I thought there was some real potential to sift out the best news content.

Search results have been largely linked to relevancy calculated by page rank. We sensed there was a huge opportunity to improve that by using activity rank in addition to page rank - that is how active a given link is on the web at any given moment. With activity rank, the moment a page goes up and people start sharing it, we can assess how important that link is. If an article is interesting, it gets shared on Twitter and Digg very, very quickly within five to ten minutes, and we use a very time-sensitive algorithm. If 15 people share that link within a short period of time, it shoots to the top of our search results. It's a new approach to search itself.


Are other search engines focusing on Twitter feeds?

Oh yes. One Riot, Topsy and others. They use purely the number of times a link has been retweeted as their ranking method and how reliable a given user is. But they are competing right against Google in that when you search for something, the layout, the results you get, are very similar to Google results.

Research shows real-time intent - 20% of the time people want to know what's going on right now on a given topic. Let's use the Michael Jackson example again. If you searched for Michael Jackson, you probably aren't interested in the Wikipedia article. You're interested in what just happened. We decided to focus on the live content only - a perfect niche. At Scoopler, our aim is not to become a replacement for Google. Like, we love Google.


Annette Moser-Wellman is President of Firemark, Inc., an innovation consultancy, and author of Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization and Running While The Earth Shakes: Creating An Innovation Strategy To Win In The Digital Age, both published by the Media Management Center.

This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.

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