Dominique asked 3 years agoPubSub looks for new stuff
Posted on Mon, Nov. 29, 2004
While most search engines can help you sift through the archives of the Internet, PubSub Concepts looks for the new stuff.
Claiming to filter millions of Web logs, SEC/Edgar filings, Internet newsgroups and news releases, PubSub’s “matching engine” (http://www.pubsub.com) recognizes new information as soon as it’s published and delivers it to subscribers on a Web page or an RSS reader.
Salim Ismail, co-founder of the 2-year-old firm, said he doesn’t see Google or Yahoo or MSN Search as the competition — perhaps because they dealing with the past.
“Our competitors are CNN News Alerts and eBay auction alerts,” Ismail added. “The instant we find it, we let you know. We answer the question of when was some company mentioned somewhere, or is there a certain car model available on Auto Trader.”
Ismail began his career as a software engineer in Europe, later becoming a management consultant for European companies and subsequently running an Internet multimedia company in Toronto. His partner, Bob Wyman, has a background that includes product management for office automation software at Digital Equipment and ActiveX development at Microsoft.
PubSub’s search engine does not spider or scour the Web. “We call ours prospective search. Other search engines collect information and you make a query, you look into the past; it’s retrospective,” Ismail explained. “Instead of storing data, we store the query so when information comes in, we can grab it.”
PubSub does not receive feeds from mainstream news sources. But he agreed that a licensing agreement with a syndicator could change that. “We’ll be adding a lot more content streams quite soon,” he said. “We’re talking with database owners of things like cars and jobs and roommate searches.”
The company’s service is free. “Eventually, we will have a subscription or advertising model, perhaps adding messages as Google does with its Alerts product,” Ismail added.