Portfolio

Addictomatic

Real-time Social Search

Dave Pell came to us with his idea to build one of the first real-time social search engines. It’s not designed to help you find answers about some error message or the cheapest flight to Aruba. Addictomatic helps you see what’s going on now on a given topic across multiple relevant sources. We went over the requirements and realized we needed to help build flexibility into the application so that it could be customized; both by Dave and the site visitors. If you didn't know search could be fun, you haven't used Addictomatic.

We came up with a pretty neat solution to all this. Plus, we were able to help build a product that we love to use ourselves. The project took about two months and we updated it three months after the initial launch in August 2008.

Search results sorted the way you like it

We built the JavaScript to allow users to drag, drop, add and remove results boxes on any search results page. Would you rather not see Flickr results? Just click the ‘x’. Should your iPhone search include results from Engadget? Simply add it from the drop down list of available sources. We implemented the scripts that make it all happen.

It looks pretty, but we can’t take all the credit

Bryan Bell did a great job with the visual design. We received the Photoshop files from Bryan and created the front-end XHTML, CSS, JS and all of the back-end systems. We then made it work across operating systems and browsers. It’s not always easy, but even with all the bells and whistles we made it happen.

Caching for performance

A lot of processing and bandwidth is needed when searching across multiple sources. To combat that, we implemented caching with memcache so that search requests are stored for a period of time, as opposed to re-requested each and every time. So, instead of hitting Goggle, CNN, and Engaget with ‘iPhone’ 100 times in a minute, we do it once and serve the results up immediately. Of course, the cache is cleared so that only the freshest results are served.

Custom results with custom URLs

The instant someone rearranges the search results boxes, a custom URL is generated that can be shared, bookmarked, and revisited. Just like magic you can revisit the unique URL and see all the results sorted exactly how you you left them. The secret is we built the period-separated hash to represent each source in each column. Pretty clever, huh?

NewsFix pages show the popular news with smart sources

These pages automatically gather the top sources on a variety of topics; you don’t want the same sites serving up results for Food as you do for Politics, right? We put together some logic that automatically generates these pages with the most appropriate sources available.

Administration abilities

We added functionality so that a lot of the site’s dynamic content can be administered. For example, the ability to modify the NewsFix sources, define ‘hot searches’ and even rearrange the default order of the results boxes.

Search across multiple sources

At any given point you can search over two dozen sources simultaneously. We built in functionality that allows for new sources to easily be added to the search engine given some basic details (name, search path, icon). If you include all the various NewsFixes, we ended up configuring over 500 searchable sources.