Gigaom Search & Alerts

I never got around to writing about the Search and Alerts products I worked on while at Gigaom. Using native WordPress features and extending it just a bit, we were able to build a full-fledged faceted search engine and notification platform at a fraction of the cost of what it cost to do when I was at Factiva.

search.gigaom.com pulled in content from across gigaom.com, research.gigaom.com, and events.gigaom.com and presented results in a way that allowed you to filter by tags and explore relationships between tags applied on to the content. Built in was a well structured taxonomy and basics smarts which would map a keyword to the appropriate tag.

Gigaom Alerts solves a different problem. While search allows you to search back in time through the archives (which at Gigaom were a significant portion of their total traffic), Alerts let’s you, in a sense, look forward. One of the problems of a media site is that it is often not a destination. Visits come by way of an app or aggregator so the challenge is getting your readers to return. Newsletters are one way but we are experiencing a proliferation of newsletters competing for readers’ attention.

Alerts was built as a way to store a standing query which would deliver notification if and only if there was new content which matched that query. Results are highly relevant because the alerts are constructed by those who read them. If you explicitly state your interest in “Nest” or “Tony Fadell” then there is a high likelihood that you will click thru on a notification of new articles about those topics. Indeed, we did see high engagement from readers that came in via Gigaom Alerts, they stayed on the site longer and read significantly more pages per session the our average readers.

Gigaom Alerts leverages the native WordPress post-taxonomy architecture so that you can have scale to a large number of individual alerts without a significant cost.

1. Each saved alert is a post
2. The terms for the alert are taxonomy terms on the post
3. The author of the post is the user to be alerted

WordPress VIP kindly archived a talk that Casey Bisson did at one of their meetups which I’ll share here along with a link to the slides.

Hat tip to the folks at Followistic.com who let me know that Casey’s session was posted. If Gigaom Alerts sounds interesting to you, I’d check them out. They have built a plug-in which works much the same and is super-easy to install if you’re running WordPress.