Friday, June 23, 2006

Findory in PC World

Findory is reviewed and compared favorably to Google News in a PC World article, "Web News Wranglers", by Ryan Singel. Some selected excerpts:
So much news on the Web, so little time to read it all.

The torrents of blog posts and news feeds on today's Internet hold way too much data to keep up with if you just browse the Web normally. Fortunately, help is here in the form of sites that filter the news for you with ever-increasing efficiency ....

[Some] sites take a more subtle approach to tuning news to your preferences by watching the stories you read. Google News may be the best known of these ... the site will monitor your news habits and Web searches, and tweak the articles it displays on its algorithmically generated Google News page. The personalized changes are slow to come and aren't explicitly marked, but the site does a remarkable job of highlighting the latest, most important news stories without human editors.

Findory uses a similar tactic ... [and] in surprisingly little time the site replaces its default, very scattershot array of stories with a lineup tailored to your interests. Findory gets better as you continue to use it, adding little symbols next to recommended stories.
In a breakout box a little further in the article, Ryan compares Findory directly to Google News. Ryan says, "[Google's] recommendation engine seems less intelligent and transparent than Findory's" and "Findory's recommendation system works rather nicely." Then, at least in terms of the quality of the personalization, Ryan awards the "edge" to Findory over Google News.

The article also discusses many other news sites, including Netvibes, My Yahoo, Rojo, Spotback, Bloglines, Digg, Memeorandum, TailRank, and Newsgator.

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