Google's announcement of a sophisticated micropayment plan for newspapers comes as a welcome development for publishers, but the race to make reading news and blogs online a seamless experience is still far from over. Accordingly, the entry of Busk into the reader market is an exciting development, providing a new way to extract exactly what you're looking for from real-time news content.
São Paulo, Brazil-based Busk is a news discovery engine that helps you browse, filter and discover new content online based on topics, keywords or news sources of your choice. Like Twitter's real-time search, Busk scours reams of indexed content to deliver news articles relevant to your interests. So, rather than scanning through the entire home page of Web Insider, a popular Brazilian tech blog, for news about the iPhone, you can type "iPhone" into the Busk search bar to see matching articles from over 15,000 sources and 100,000,000 indexed pages of content.
According to Busk co-founder, Helder Araujo, people already know what kind of news and information they are looking for when they go online. Busk makes finding it easier by crawling the web for any tags that match the requested search terms -- even searching within in-text links for keywords.
The BUSK interface is crisp, with the statement "Find news about..." hovering above a chunky search bar. BUSK functions like Twitter's real-time search, hunting for tagged articles from its retinue of sources, Unlike an RSS reader that collects posts from content creators across the web. While Busk is only available in Portuguese so far, Aruajo said an English-language version is due by the beginning of October and 10 more major languages -- Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew and Arabic -- will be available by year's end.
The Busk engineering team is also hard at work on an algorithm that can "understand" the content of an article based on properties like word order, syntax and subject-verb agreement. Busk also recently released is its "brainpie" feature, a pie chart that visually displays a user's reading diet based on article tags, or the source of a particular article.
Araujo said he and his team were motivated by the fact that RSS readers are still too complicated for the average internet user. Instead, users stay on the Busk site to read full articles, while impressions are recorded for the content producers, creating a win-win situation for publishers, the aggregator and readers alike. Once users find content they like, they can save and share articles with any other member on the site.
Typical news aggregators rely on display ads to generate revenue. Even though it delivers content created by others, Busk has a four-pronged revenue strategy that includes:
- Contextual advertising
- B2B search solutions
- Cotextual e-commerce
- Micropayment
BUSK has over 10,000 users despite being in limited beta mode since January.