In the past, we have written extensively about the potential of BOSS, Yahoo’s open search web services platform. BOSS is an open API that lets developers access and manipulate Yahoo’s search results. A wide range of companies, including Hakia and Me.dium, are currently using it to power their own search engines. One of the more interesting applications of BOSS we have come across lately is PopGist. PopGist blends search results with Techmeme-like discussion sections that list related stories from other sites.
PopGist’s developer, Matthew Chen, is also the co-founder of Megite, a once popular memetracker that surely gave Matthew the inspiration for this project.
Not Pretty – But it Works
PopGist is not much to look at. Neither its Google inspired logo nor the bland presentation of its search results immediately instilled a feeling of confidence in us. If you can look past that, however, the search results themselves are very useful.
If you search for Google Chrome, for example, PopGist will return reviews from most major blogs as well. If you look for a company, PopGist will also include links to profiles on services like TradeVibes in the results. At its best, PopGist can become a one-stop search engine for researching a company or a product and safe you a lot of time and energy, as you won’t have to try multiple search queries to get relevant results.
Services like PopGist tend to be prone to being overrun by spam, but surprisingly, PopGist’s results always came back very clean. In our tests, PopGist usually returned the best results when entering relatively simple queries and the most useful discussion sections were always clustered around the top three results.
Overall, we were impressed with PopGist’s results. While it surely won’t replace Google for us, its search results allow us to get a quick glance at a product in its context without having to use various services.
