Over the last few months, Crowd Favorite has had the privilege of working with Dave Pell to create a new search service: Addictomatic
Addictomatic is a search aggregator, a way to see results from lots of sources all at once. Want to see the latest on a presidential candidate? Or the newest iPhone rumors? Or perhaps an ego search? Addictomatic has you covered.
This isn’t a traditional search engine. 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.
We’ve implemented a number of pretty nice features on the site. One of these is the ability to drag and drop the results boxes around to re-order them.
You can also click the little X to remove a source from a page, or you can drop down the Available Sources panel to remove and add sources.
When you make changes to the results page, either re-ordering the sources and/or removing the ones you don’t want to include, you get a nice bookmarkable URL as a result. That URL will bring you right back to your search, with the layout you specified.
In addition to being able to create new searches, Addictomatic also offers a collection of NewsFix pages that gather the top sources on a variety of topics. I’m mainly visiting the Election 2008 and Baseball pages of late, though I also enjoy hitting Thought 2.0 and Web 2.0 with some regularity.
Building this service has been an interesting experience on a number of fronts, but one of the most exciting has been discovering that it’s something I want to use myself. I liked the idea when Dave first explained it to me, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d use it. As it turns out, I now use it quite a bit – it’s sticky. Much like Twitter, it’s value is hard to explain but readily apparent once you use it for a while.
The design of the site was done by well known designer Bryan Bell, who did a terrific job. We received the Photoshop files from him and created the front-end XHTML+CSS+JavaScript and all of the back-end systems.
Many thanks to Dave for letting us help him bring Addictomatic to the web.
UPDATE: Dave’s blog post is here and Bryan’s is here.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Davenetics* : I Inhaled. Now You Should. Addictomatic adds this Pingback:
[...] Excellent work by the entire team over there. Alex does a great job explaining the service on his blog. Hat tip also to Bryan Bell. I’ve been wanting to work with him for awhile and he did an [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 7:09 pm
EricM adds this Comment:
Another popurls/alltop rippoff?
May 1st, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Addictomatic certainly shares some features/concepts with popurls and Alltop, however those sites each have their own niche. popurls shows the popular items from a variety of sites, Alltop has pre-set topic pages. In contrast, Addictomatic allows you to choose what to search for.
Try it out with some searches of your own, you might find you like it.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Sunil adds this Comment:
Interesting concept, the customisable and bookmark-able UI is a great idea. I’ll give it some regular use and see whether it “sticks”!
One bug, perhaps: whilst all the other sources work fine, the Google News, Google News Images and Delicious tags always return “No Results Found” after several seconds of the loading circle, even for a popular term like “iphone”.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:59 am
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
And hey, it got Daring Fireball’d [with you name-checked; although you probably want to go correct John on that one].
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:18 am
Dan adds this Comment:
I agree, it’s not a ripoff. But I’ve been using another site called Feedables which is similar to this concept as well. They provide RSS to all their sites as well as an iPhone interface. You can also sign up to get your own.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:35 am
goblinbox adds this Comment:
Oooh, I *heart* Addictomatic! Customisable! Linkable!
May 2nd, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Chris Frerecks adds this Comment:
Neat.
May 4th, 2008 at 6:41 am
chidi nebo adds this Comment:
Addict-o-matic sounds really impressive. While I cannot describe myself as being ‘techy’, I’d like ot see how it works. Already, I’m looking at how it can be modified to work in an environment like here in Nigeria. Great stuff. Inventors like you make the world go round. Keep it up.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:26 am
H. Duthel adds this Comment:
I think Addictomatic is the best I have seen as RSS News. Is estethic and attractiv to, and very clear all.
I think is a great amazing job.
I have it added to my website.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Alex L. adds this Comment:
What language did you end up deciding on to power the back-end for this? PHP? RoR?
I’ve never seen comparisons between the built in RSS parsers for either of these languages, so I’m interested to know which direction you took to get the performance where you needed it.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
We wrote the site in PHP, but did not use any frameworks (CodeIgniter, CakePHP, etc.) in order to streamline everything.
The best RSS parser out there is the Universal Feed Parser, it’s written in Python.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
(a different) Alex adds this Comment:
Very nice deisgn. Looking foward to using it
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Presenting at Refresh Denver | alexking.org adds this Pingback:
[...] Denver meeting this coming Wednesday. I’ll be talking about Addictomatic, which we had the opportunity to build earlier this [...]
June 12th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Addictomatic Refreshed | alexking.org adds this Pingback:
[...] The overall look has been updated with a great new design from Bryan Bell, and a number of little features have been added and minor tweaks made since the initial launch. [...]
August 6th, 2008 at 11:18 am
zara clothing adds this Comment:
Rather interesting search engine. How is the progress of it?
December 25th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Padunic adds this Comment:
Hi,
Great, great job!
You plan sell this like a script or is just a new service on the web?
I would like build some like that in south america market.
Regards.
May 3rd, 2009 at 11:22 am