PubSub : Wall Street Journal’s Mossberg gives it a thumbs up

PubSub is a vehicle for staying updated on self-selected topics that appear in blogs, news groups, SEC filings and news releases.
Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal just tested PubSub and found it added a dimension to search that goes beyond what the main Google and Yahoo search sites offer.

In a normal search, you type in a term and the search engine tries to match it against an index of Web sites. It’s a one-time process. But in a PubSub search, your search terms stay constant and are continuously matched against a changing stream of data gleaned from PubSub’s sources. When a match occurs, even if it’s months after you entered your search term, it pops up in PubSub and you’re notified.

Mossberg also provides instructions on setting up a PubSub search.

To create a PubSub search, which the company calls a ‘subscription,’ you go to pubsub.com and type in the term or terms you want PubSub to continuously match against the data it collects. You can have multiple subscriptions, and the whole thing is free.

You can check for results by visiting the PubSub Web site, or you can incorporate PubSub into your browser by downloading a ‘sidebar’ module that lists PubSub results in a special window and notifies you if a new match has been found. These sidebars are available for Internet Explorer on Windows and for Firefox on Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

I’ve not only been following PubSub for awhile, but I’m also the editor of PubSub’s Law Blog Community List of the most influential law blogs. I think PubSub has a lot of potential.

Source for post: SearchEngineWatch