Trapit today announced the public beta of its personalized discovery engine. After conducting a successful private beta, Trapit is now being made available to the public. Trapit combs the web to find the most relevant content for each individual user and creates personalized topic-specific traps that are constantly updating.
To get started, users simply enter a search term into Trapit, from which the application will display results based upon its understanding of the context of the articles, as well as the users unique, personal interests. Users can save those results as a trap, which will persistently comb the web for more relevant articles and content. Over time, as users provide feedback to the discovery engine, Trapit will further improve its personalized recommendations.
Search, as we have known it for the past decade, is really just an elaborate popularity contestits a way to quickly find stuff that everyone else thinks is important, said Hank Nothhaft Jr., co-founder and chief product officer at Trapit. Trapits discovery engine is all about high-quality content thats relevant specifically to you, not just what the crowd is buzzing about today.
Over the course of the private beta period, Trapit has implemented improvements and enhancements across all facets of the application and underlying technology. Trapits list of carefully vetted sources now includes roughly 100,000 sites from across the Web, and the service continues to add more sources every week.
The private beta also led to several major improvements to the user interface, as well as improvements to the underlying personalization technology, and entirely new features like the activity stream that gives users a view of all the new content thats relevant to their interests in one real-time view.
Were thrilled to announce the public beta of Trapit, said Gary Griffiths, CEO and co-founder of Trapit. Were starting with our own web app, but the opportunity here is much bigger, this is about the next evolution of web discovery in a post-search world. We expect to power sites and services across the web. The web has gotten way too big for a one-size-fits-all solution; no one likes to think of themselves as the crowd. All web services are going to need personalization.
Trapits personalization technology understands the individual user as a constantly moving target. It takes for granted that users interests, attentions, intentions and goals around what they seek and want in web content are in perpetual flux. Just as individuals are not static, their search results are not static either.
Born out of SRI Internationals CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project, the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. history, and the same project that gave birth to Apples personal assistant technology Siri, Trapit utilizes CALOs advanced technologies to personalize the user experience at the individual level and continually improve with use.
New features and enhancements to the Trapit platform include:
