DEMO: Ensembli recommends stories to you with personalized touch
Ensembli looks at which search results you click on to create a personalized news collector for the mass market.
There are already good personalization search engines out there, but most of them are too complicated for everyday users. Ensembli tries to automate the process of delivering relevant news to you, without putting you through a lot of work customizing the engine to your tastes.
With Ensembli’s patented personalization algorithms, you can get recommendations for stories on any topic you enter. It serves you the articles that it thinks are most relevant and most popular. Then you start choosing which results are most appropriate for you by clicking on the links it provides. If you rate one story with a star, Ensembli emphasizes it even more. And as you read more stories, Ensembli takes your choices into account and keeps improving its relevance. So, as you go back over and over, you can get better and better results.
It seems that every search engine or news aggregation service ought to be doing this, but the company says there is some difficult computer science involved. Michael Wheatley, Ensembli’s chief executive, said that none of the feed readers and other tools that experts use for specialized search have made it to the mainstream. The company says that it has partners that will help it generate revenue through ads and other programs.
The company has five employees and is based in Sheffield, England. Its public beta is now available. Ensembli raised a seed round of $1.3 million in 2007 and is raising a new round now. Investors include Enterprise Ventures and Viking Fund.
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About the Author, Dean Takahashi
Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.