Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Topix.net and mangled advertisements

Digital Cameras News - Topix.net

Topix.net is a largescale news aggregator. I prefer Google's front page, but Topix has a very large ontology (knowledge structure) of news topics. That's not evident from the front page, but if you search on a topic you can quickly get long lists of topic domains -- about 250,000 according to an NPR show.

This is their topic collection for digital cameras. They do some kind of limited RSS feed as well. I'll experiment with this and probably link from my news page to very specific Topix.net domains -- such as digital photography.

They seem to use the targeted advertising business model, which could be a great fit to these focal domains. It doesn't work so well when searching on domains that aren't in their ontology. Here's an ad associated with results from a search on "plague":
Buy Plague Products
We link to merchants which offer Plague products for sale.


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