Topix’ Not-So-Wayback-Machine

We’ve all used the The Wayback Machine, the hieroglyphics of early web pages. Sometimes joyful in spirits, often embarrassing in execution. Now Topix gives us the Not-So-Wayback-Machine. It’s cool, useful and based on more than a dollop of commonsense.

Most of the stuff we want to find is recent stuff. But recent to the human memory doesn’t mean the recency of a Google News, which returns hundreds of too-similar results on major news events. Tool through the results, and you appreciate speed; so many results just hours old. But you don’t appreciate the duplication, the AP stories embedded in so many other stories, and on so many websites, with differing headlines giving you a brief sense that fresh content may lay a click away. 

You can of course try the one alternative to recency, relevance. That toggle, defaulted to recency, is a part of our web consciousness. Pick recency though and what you gain is offset by finding stuff from 1996 or 2003 that’s usually on-topic but outdated. 

Topix's new widget finally offers an improvement. 

First off, Topix is now indexing and displaying 52 weeks of content from its 10,000 indexed sources. That’s about 48 weeks more than we can easily get to on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Making the content available is one thing; making it relatively easy to get to is one what I like most about Topix’ new move.  Its Click-o-Gram (the Not-So-Wayback-Machine) makes easier to marry these elusive notions of relevance and recency, and find more of what we want. The Click-o-Gram lets users click on any of the last 12 months and then presents results from that month first, followed by previous months. It comes in handy when you have a sense of finding something that happened a few months ago.

A bonus: on each search result, the Click-o-Gram also graphs the volume of hits on the search term(s). It’s a quick popularity index, dynamic metadata on top of search data. And indexes are always fun to play with. 

This Topix innovation comes packaged with two others. One, a right top-of-the-page option allows you to choose to de-dupe results.  Good idea; how much different it makes I'm not yet sure of.  Second, it has added some smarts – making good use of log analysis, I assume –to deal with case. Topix notes that the difference from the word “it” and IT.

I tried ERA and got the raft of baseball results I wanted, without the clutter of bygone eras.

Look at the innovations in news search as a smartening-up. Free news search has clearly been first-generation – as is news aggregation. The time is overripe for great leaps. The tech tools we have in the culture -- delicate wirecutters as compared to the chainsaws of early Net -- should now enable much greater shading and higher-quality results. 

Kudos to the Topix team on the work. The Topix Blog notes the contributions of Robert Torres, Topix’ new creative director. Robert, a KRD alumnus, may be enjoying the freedom of being unshackled by the Knight Ridder Digital templates, and we hope to see more great work from him.

Think of all the shadings that we as news consumers could use, in addition to the recency/relevance one Topix provides and the free search/paid search that’s become an accepted model:

• Current/archival: Topix now begins to do this. The divide though is still a chasm and plainly consumers want the contextual past to the present now and the present now from the contextual past.
• Geo/vertical: Topix’ founders were shrewd in positioning their company as a local play – and won outsized    Tribune/Gannett/Knight Ridder investment ($45-50 million)– based on it. They’ve also positioned the company as the ultimate topical (vertical) search engine, saying they’ve created 360,000    categories. It’s never been easy to understand what that means. Now merge the geo and the vertical in ways that make sense to consumers – we all live our lives in the physical here and in the topical there – and you may have something revolutionary.
• News/opinion: The Internet cries out for better sourcing and disclosure, better differentiation between factual reporting and commentary. Sure, the web should be a free-for-all of ideas, but labeling what’s what – not an easy task – is something a lot of readers would like.
• Text/audio/video: All sites are still struggling to get these content type metaphors properly presented and associated with each other, de-duped, in ways that make sense to the consumer.
• Journalist/blogger: In the both/and universe of the web, everyone’s got a place. As with news/opinion, disclosure – understanding the writer’s intent and affiliation – is key. The Topixs of the world can help bring some new order to this fascinating Wild West.     

 

 

 

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