Artiklz Blog

What is Artiklz Doing…

Well here it is … we’ve made a few tweaks to the platform that have resulted in a performance boost to how our User Generated Content and Conversaton (UGC2) search engine will now return its search and display of the results. First, our indexing of the millions of near-time UGC2 that is acquired by our webcrawlers and scripts is immediately available for searching. This ensures that your search results are as current as machine-possible. While the default timeline search parameter is set to a 90 day look-back period, the user can always go into the advance search and set this parameter to as far back as 4 years into history or any date range as desired.

Second, we’ve implemented a standard form factor to the Artiklz search results. Rather than presenting the voluminuous amount of content that is available with each article of UGC2, our users wanted more of a snapshot of the returned data. There’s also the Tag Cloud to help “filter” through all the noise so play with it and shoot us your thoughts. So, there it is on-demand by demand. For added measure here’s a quick run I did for one of our favorite tech blogs. Feel free to change the sorting based on your preference for the result display.

Enjoy!

John

UGC Search Engine Refinement

Well, it’s been almost 45 days since our initial launch out of private beta.  While the road to this point has been a bit rocky, Team Artiklz has learned a lot and have been working aggressively to resolve some of the usability challenges identified over the past few months from private to public beta.

Some of our users shared with us that the response times for presenting the search results were very slow. We certainly understand the reasons behind our users bringing this to our attention. However, what isn’t known to the typical user of a search platform such as Artiklz is that we’ve amassed such a significant amount of rich data and diverse content in our database for users to access, which in turn creates a large challenge with respect to the indexing of this data due to the heterogeneous sources of content and the nonstandard formats in which they are published.

Unlike most blog or social media search engines, Artiklz applies a highly sophisticated algorithm to create threaded comment or conversation structures. This helps users to better conceptualize what is happening in a conversation string as opposed to the more typical fragmented results that are returned by other “mashup”-based search platforms.

In comparison to a Google or Ask.com type of search, where these traditional search engines are designed to index reference links to particular websites that they have crawled, hence, the data and content is not as intensive to analyze nor return to the user’s screen. Because of this more limited type of indexing, these engines are capable of returning results in milli-seconds, a feat nearly impossible for true UGC-based search engines that provide internal support for threaded comments and/or create algorithms to generate a threaded conversation structure when one doesn’t exist (note: these tasks require millions of computuations to occur).

Having said all that, Team Artiklz nonetheless continues to strive for a better user experience regardless of the technical challenges. We’ve been toiling with a number of solutions to address the problem and feel highly confident with what we will be introducing in a few short days.

John

Artiklz Is Sweeping Up Social Media

Over the past week, Artiklz has finally completed the near-time content acquisition effort and we’re excited to see how this will benefit our users.
Thanks again to readers such as Andy Merrett for their positive encouragement regarding our service as we are always looking to incorporate our users’ suggestions and feedback where appropriate.

Our team here at Artiklz is closing out a busy week of work and looking forward to relaxing with our friends during Super Bowl Sunday! Let’s see what people are saying about the Super Bowl this year.

Visit the site and start searching against the 20 million+ comments currently available.

Share Your Finds!

Some things in life are worth sharing and Artiklz is one of them!

Ever read something online and think, “My dad would love this article about organic gardening!” I do this all the time. My loved ones are lucky to have a friend like me because I spam their inboxes with all sorts of mail. But how about sharing what people are saying? Unfortunately, there was no easy way to share this information with someone until now…

Artiklz allows you to share not only topics and articles of interest, but also what people are saying about them! Artiklz search results are structured in a way for you to view comments about a particular topic, as well as the source from where the comments were made.

Artiklz has made it easy to choose specific comments to send to a friend while you are actively searching and reading through the results.

There’s a Share icon to the right of each comment. Clicking on this will indicate that you want to Share that particular comment with a friend. Once you are done choosing the comments, click on Share My Finds at the top right and fill in the required information. An email will be sent to your friend with the comments you chose and their respective articles.

If you prefer, you do not need to choose any comments to share. With this method, we’ll include a link in the email for your friend to Artiklz and view your same search results.

This feature helps keep your friends in the loop of stuff that you find interesting!

Artiklz Tips and Tricks To Help You Search More Effectively

Now that Artiklz has publicly launched in beta, let’s see what it can do for you!

I want to share with you some tricks and methodologies to help you get your desired search results.

When you first do a search, the results will be sorted by relevance (results with more mentions of the keyword(s) are ranked higher), therefore the most relevant results will be presented first. You can change the sorting method by using the Sort drop-down filter.

Relevancy works great, especially when I search for specific topics such as “chocolate chip recipes”. The first article I find is titled “Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies”. I can click on the article title and I am taken directly to the source blog and the recipe is right there! And I can even read the comments directly on Artiklz without navigating away from my search results. This sounds like a great recipe, I think I’ll try it out tonight!

There is another drop-down filter to require that the search keyword(s) must be in either the article or the comments. When I search for a broad term such as “recipes”, I want to use the filter to narrow the results. Instead of “Require match in: Any”, I choose “Require match in: Articles” because I want to make sure my search keyword must be in the article title or article content. For this particular search, I don’t care to see  results where only the comments contain the keyword “recipes”.

The keyword(s) or phrase you search for are highlighted in the search results to help you easily navigate through the results and focus in on the areas of interest.

Artiklz returns results from various sources. We have comments from blogging platforms, social news sites, forums, review sites, and much more. Since comments are coming from multiple places, the category filters are a useful tool to filter the comments from specific sources that you only want to see.

I like to search for comments regarding tips to stay healthy during the winter season.

At first when I type in “how to stay healthy” I don’t get a whole lot of comments. So I’m going to add some other keywords to search on, such as diet, exercise, and fruits. I put these words in the “One or more of these words” field in Advanced Search. Now I see some interesting comments about specific diets for specific cultures, and how where you live and what you are used to eating really matters and should affect the type of diet you choose.

I see a really informative comment about exercising and how it reshapes your body and keeps organs healthy. This commenter believes that exercise is the key, and is more effective than fads like the Atkin’s diet.

Artiklz Advanced search provides ways for you to create your own queries to get the results you want exactly. Think of it as refined, custom searching where you get to build your search in bits and pieces.

The Timeframe allows you to specify a time range so that the results set will fall within the two dates provided. You can also get the results for last “n” days.

Searching for one keyword can yield an overwhelming amount of results. Let’s use the Advanced Search to narrow the results.

If you put a phrase under “All these words”, this means that your search results will contain all of the words you specified, in any order.

“This exact wording or phrase” will ensure that the search results contain matches of the exact phrase you entered, in the exact order you entered it.

“One or more of these words” will return results that have at least one of the keywords you specified.

If you are searching for the latest furniture trends, but absolutely despise furniture from Pottery Barn (just an example, because everyone likes Pottery Barn!), then you would want to specify Pottery Barn in “Any of these unwanted words” and any results that contain the phrase will be omitted from your search results.

If you want to read articles and comments about furniture trends and maybe find furniture from a specific store like Ashley Furniture, then you can put “Ashley” under “This exact wording or phrase”.

If you want to learn about furniture trends with an Asian or European influence, include these keyword in “One or more of these words”. The results you can expect to see are conversations about furniture trends having one of more of these cultures’ influences.

Go ahead and try it out for yourself. You’ve got nothing to lose!

Artiklz Goes Public with Beta

Greetings everyone,

After many months of hard work by the team, we have finally made it out of the starting gates. It’s been an exciting process observing and participating in the development of the many facets that went into the construction of the Artiklz service. The team spent a significant amount of time on the road meeting and greeting with folks from all walks of life to share the Artiklz story. All this led to the culmination of our launch this past week.

Bear in mind, this is our initial beta and we will be working very aggressively over the next several weeks and months to incorporate the feedback and suggestions of the many users of the private beta into features and functions that we can roll out ASAP!

Please visit the Artiklz conversation search engine and give it a spin. And let us know what else we can do to improve your user experience — we’re always interested in hearing what we can do better for our users!

Next Generation Conversation Search Is Here!

I have BIG news! The Artiklz Conversation Search Engine is currently in private beta and coming soon to you!

“Conversation Search” is the next generation search engine that allows users to answer the questions of Who, When, Where, Why, and What people are discussing across social media.

Why is Artiklz so valuable? We offer unique, user-generated content across the social media in one convenient site for users to discover conversations through search. There is no longer a need to search various sites to find out what’s being said about something. Artiklz brings all the conversations around any particular topic of interest to the user in one place!

Sources
We have aggregated conversations across various sources ranging from blogs, review sites, content rating and sharing services, forums, and many more to bring our users a wide range of results covering the world wide web. We are constantly adding more sources so the results will be even richer with every search.

User Interface
The interface is presented in a clean and orderly display allowing users to filter their results to find exactly what they are looking for.

The search bar is fixed at the top of the page to allow users to easily perform a new search or filter results immediately on the current screen.

The comments containing the keyword(s) will be displayed in the default display with the keyword(s) highlighted for ease of viewing.

Quick and easy ways to expand and collapse full articles, and all comments in the thread.

Value of Results, Options to filter search results
Results are gathered by matching the keyword(s) to articles as well as comments, offering the widest range of results. Users can choose to show results matching articles only, comments only, or both articles and comments.

We offer the ability to sort results by number of comments, most recent comments, length of comment, and number of unique commenters.

Users can also filter results by types of sources (news, blogs, reviews, etc).

Advanced search will offer even more options for search.

Share!
Don’t forget to use “Share My Finds” to send your interesting search results to your friends and to invite them to try Artiklz for themselves! You can select the comments you want to share by clicking on the share icon near the matched comments.

Watch as I search for topics I’m interested in!

Making The Lives Of Blog Owners Even Better!

Hey guys,

This is Iris again!

Bloggers, we didn’t forget about you. We have some cool things for you to use too!

The first one you can obtain for your blog(s) is the Artiklz Plugins. Currently, only WordPress blogs are supported. We will be adding more platforms shortly.

This bundle of plugins offered by Artiklz will allow users to immediately engage in conversations happening around the web. By downloading the new plugin, you will have access to two cool features: BlogFeed and CommentsOnTheGo.

BlogFeed

Artiklz is instantly notified once new posts or comments are made to your blog. There will be no lag as events that occur on your blog are instantly logged into our service and in doing so, BlogFeed enables real-time engagement for your readership and commenters.

CommentsOnTheGo

The CommentsOnTheGo plugin allows users to reply to comment notifications via email and/or mobile device (using SMS).

The second feature we introduced is the ability to import blogs into Artiklz.

Users can access “Import Blogs” in their My Account tab under the Manage Blogs section. This feature allows users to automatically import their blogs from blog cataloging sites where they are already registered by simply entering their username. We currently support Technorati, BlogCatalog, and MyBlogLog.

You can view our demo to see these features at work.

What are you waiting for? Go ahead log in, download, and start using!

Private Beta - Conversation Search Engine

Hey guys,

I hope Turkey Day was wonderful for all of you!

The Artiklz team has been working hard over the holidays since we received a substantial number of responses from TechCrunch readers in response to this post.

Due to a very overwhelming response to the TechCrunch invite, we will be announcing more invites to other groups later this week.

For our blog readers, just leave a comment with your email and we’ll be sure to include you in this exciting launch.

Stay tuned for more holiday happenings at Artiklz!

Three New Items For Blog Readers

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce that we have just released three additional features for all of you blog readers out there.

Artiklz is introducing a new Firefox Toolbar.

The toolbar allows users to access Artiklz services via a sidebar, so that your browsing experience is uninterrupted. You are able to edit your profile, set up particular items to watch (blog, article, or person), and to manage your watched items. All this is available in the sidebar, accessible by the toolbar in your Firefox browser.

The second item is the Bookmarklet, which will allow you to easily and quickly watch a blog, article or person. There is not need to visit our website or be a registered user. Simply click on the bookmarklet in the bookmarks toolbar, a screen will pop up with options on what to watch, and the fields will be auto-populated with the information from the blog you are currently reading.

The last item, which I found to be invaluable, is the User Interface for Web-based Notifications.

We are now offering all the notifications for all the items you are watching in one central location. If you prefer not to receive notifications via email, IM, or SMS, you can access all your alerts via: My Account » Watched Items.

Here you can view all the updates in a few ways. You can see all the postings and comments for each individual item you are watching; you can view a timeline for each item, which will display all the activity as one continuous stream of events; and you can view a global timeline that merges all activity from all the items you are watching into one continuous stream of events.

Want to learn more? We’ve put together a short demo to highlight what I’ve just shared.

Let Artiklz help you navigate the blogosphere…