Where other real-time search engines focus on hot tweets, popular links, and the like, Factery Labs skips all that and surfaces the facts behind the day’s trending news.
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Factery Labs tracks the trending topics from the Twitter and Google Trends APIs to determine what’s hot right now. It identifies relevant tweets and URLs from Twitter, and also taps into Yahoo BOSS to identify additional URLs that may be relevant to the trending topics. Once it has this collection of URLs, it scans them for facts and applies its FactRank technology (a nod to Google’s PageRank) to build what users see on the site’s “Trends” tab.
“We drill past the links and get into the pages to see if there’s something valuable to the user’s request,” Pedersen said last week. “It’s not news; it’s news according to what the web says is news. We show what’s happening as defined by the web, not by an editor.”
Matt concludes:
What I like about Factery’s fact engine is that it does the grunt work for me. It not only shows me what’s hot in the news right now, but it also tells me why. Popular tweets and links are part of the real-time equation, but some of that is noise; I think there’s real value in Factery’s focus on the facts.
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