PubSub is a new kid on the block, and might offer some competition to google. In short, it is an amplified version of "Google Alerts" - which allowed you to track the news as it happened and send you alerts. (For example, I could track "application wiki" and get an email (or use their app) of all weblogs/news sources which will have these keywords.

So could it be a google competitor? Because ratio of searches for "existing information" to "new information" is going to reduce over the time, it could well be. PubSub has solved the tough part of matching your queries with changing information anywhere in the web. (Well, "anywhere" is probably only blogs and news sources for now, but I guess they can track changing websites as well). So storing those queries for a long-term is not a big deal. When you have enough queries that you actually find most queries are repeats, then the system is, in essence, google - without having to store all the web pages, but only the fact that they have changed. (Well, google cache is still something we love!)

Coming to sharing queries, I think that PubSub people should assign it a high priority. Stored queries introduce browses on information, and that is always good. For example "Top tutorials in XML" is a browse, whereas "Tutorials in XML" will just be a search. Obviously, the framework would also have ranking and all that, but then reputation services are going to be next big thing, right?


permalink 8:07 PM