Feedster Redefines Internet Search, Targeted Media, and Advertising Delivery
Feedster is a rapidly growing Internet search engine and advertising network that provides timely and meaningful information to consumers and large Internet sites in need of targeted media. Feedster provides a fresh index across over 20 million feeds several times per hour, adding millions of new documents daily. Feedster benefits from the ways that blogging is changing the Internet’s basic building blocks – from unstructured web pages to structured documents.
As blogging became mainstream in 2004, it was accompanied by RSS. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is the structured data format used originally to syndicate blogs and news, but is now spreading quickly to mainstream commercial use in job postings, e-commerce, and enterprise applications. For instance, over five thousand new job postings are added to Feedster via RSS daily. According to Pew Internet and American Life Project’s recent report, 32 million Americans read blogs, 8 million have their own blogs, and 6 million have RSS readers. RSS is growing at a scale comparable to web pages in the mid-1990s.There are now millions of feeds, up from thousands two years ago.
Feedster index of over twenty million syndicated feeds, including more than 75,000 professionally published sources such as the BBC, CNET, The New York Times, and Wired.
Feedster Searches for Updated Posts from Millions of Sources
Feedster’s harnessing of RSS is changing search and the expectations of Internet searchers. Timeliness is the most obvious benefit. Feedster offers a fresh index from millions of sources several times an hour. While traditional search engines may provide updated information at a similar pace, since they are search HTML rather than XML documents, they cannot deliver the same depth of information, nor can they discover updated posts to existing content. Subtler but more important is the meaning and precision inherent in RSS that Feedster automatically leverages into specialized search including blogs, news, jobs, local, events, and for sale listings.
Technology
In order to exploit the far-reaching advantages of a purely XML-generated and delivered Internet search engine, Feedster has made significant changes and improvements to each part of the search engine workflow. From the early head start we enjoyed due to our proprietary RSS feed discovery crawler to the sustainable advantages we expect from our patentable applications and RSS server indexing technology, search server architecture, scaled XML feed delivery, and first-mover status, Feedster is redefining precision, timeliness and relevancy for Internet search. Our management team is and senior software architects collectively provide the deepest feed-serving experience with over 40 years of search and indexing experience.
Background
Feedster was founded in March 2003 and is now a 19-person company based in San Francisco. In May 2005, the Company closed a Series A round of venture financing The investment was led by Selby Venture Partners, a leading early-stage venture firm in Silicon Valley, with additional funds from existing investors Omidyar Network, Mitsui & Co. Ltd., members of the New York Angels, and prominent angel investors.
