In its latest offering of what have been called the Google Killer, Siri’s founders – the DARPA-commissioned artificial-intelligence project launched Trapit in public beta Tuesday as a personalized discovery engine for the web. The service offers users a search-free, sit-back-and-relax way to stumble upon news articles, images, videos, recipes and other content on specific topics of interest which is simply awesome! More than 10,000 participants have been using Trapit to find and “trap” content since the site’s private beta release in June.
Co-founder Gary Griffiths said, “We’re revolutionizing the way people will access content on the web. This is the web following you.” Siri’s founders have seen the web and are attempting to revolutionize it in a way that Google had failed. Trapit is to the web as Siri is to the phone and it is likely that more users will begin to use the service and will infact like it. Trapit works when you tell Trapit what you want to discover with a keyword or two. The intelligent discovery engine then goes to work and scans an archive of data collected over the past 30 days. In 10 seconds or less, Trapit will find and return up to 100 pieces of content related to your keywords.
You can save the results to a topic-based information stream, called a “trap.” After you hit save, the artificial engine continues to grab new content as it’s published to the web and adds it to the trap. Trapit says that its discovery process is beyond search and is much more sophisticated. When you search for something, Trapit is actually doing is taking your keyword and matching it against content with the same context, making associations at a level deeper than text.
Trapit, founded in early 2010, has raised several million for its intelligent discovery engine. The startup landed $2 million in its first round of financing, and is said to be in the process of raising a second, more sizable round. The company plans to release mobile applications for iOS in early 2012
via Source.