3 ms·

Eureka Science news - automated science news aggregator startup

6 points by FiReaNG3L 18y ago

FiReaNG3L 18y ago
My new startup - a news aggregator for science, akin to what Google News does but better as it also find and publishes related press releases directly on the site. Science is the first vertical we chose to use the platform we developed on, but we plan to adapt it for general news (if we can get funding to aggregate AP news for example) and other verticals. Comments / criticism welcome :)
motoko 18y ago
This looks very nice, I like it a lot. How much work did it take to make this?
- FiReaNG3L 18y ago
  Considering that I'm doing my PhD (Retrovirology, I work on AIDS - I'm posting from a level 3 bioconfinement lab right now ;)) and that I could work only part time on it, it took me about a year (working at night - thanks insomnia!). Much longer than I previously thought, but it required lots of tweaking to get good clusters along with good performance / scalability. Im very satisfied with the result and plan to adapt it to other news verticals as well as add functionality (comments, voting, etc) in the future. Glad that you like it! :)
  - motoko 18y ago
    Are you looking for help? I may be interested, and this is something that I've been working on, too. Where are you located? Are you in the SF bay area?
shafqat 18y ago
Very nice... How did you do the clustering? Did you use an open source tool or build the algorithms yourself? I like the niche you picked - science news! Good luck.
- FiReaNG3L 18y ago
  Clustering is a 2 part process - calculate scores, then cluster. For the second part we used an open source perl API to a C library (very fast) for hierarchical clustering : http://search.cpan.org/~mdehoon/Algorithm-Cluster-1.38/ http://search.cpan.org/~mdehoon/Algorithm-Cluster-1.38/ I picked this niche because Im a scientist, mainly ;) I built the now #1 biology news website on the web (biologynews.net - #1 according to search engines) 3 years ago - Eureka Science News is the logical continuation of this effort.
pierrefar 18y ago
Is this an aggregator of press releases? If so, it's hardly science news: there is no critical thinking reviewing the results. It's more like science spin. At best, it's will be a good source of story tips for bloggers. I'm talking from experience as a science blogger. Please correct me if I'm wrong about your sources - I don't mean to offend. Also, your name is very similar to an existing science "news" service from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (the AAAS). They call theirs EurekAlert ( http://www.eurekalert.org/ http://www.eurekalert.org/ ), and the title of their home page is "EurekAlert - Science News". Because of this, you'll have a tough time ranking in the search engines since eurekalert.org is such an established site.
- FiReaNG3L 18y ago
  It's indeed targeted at non-scientific people; bloggers, highschool students, etc. It`s a press release aggregator, but it also cluster news from other sites, giving more sources for each story. However, the big plus is that it ranks stories in order of importance. And as for search engine ranking, Eurekalert is a public non profit service, so they dont market much. Science daily use their press releases and is #1 for 'science news', even if its horrible in usability / design. Of course, we intend to change that ;) But we know the competition is fierce in this niche.
  - pierrefar 18y ago
    Have you seen PostGenomic and BPR3.org? They're doing something very interesting.
    - FiReaNG3L 18y ago
      Aware of PostGenomic (great initiative!), gonna check out BPR3 thanks for the link :)

6 points by FiReaNG3L 18y ago

My new startup - a news aggregator for science, akin to what Google News does but better as it also find and publishes related press releases directly on the site. Science is the first vertical we chose to use the platform we developed on, but we plan to adapt it for general news (if we can get funding to aggregate AP news for example) and other verticals. Comments / criticism welcome :)

motoko 18y ago

This looks very nice, I like it a lot. How much work did it take to make this?

FiReaNG3L 18y ago
Considering that I'm doing my PhD (Retrovirology, I work on AIDS - I'm posting from a level 3 bioconfinement lab right now ;)) and that I could work only part time on it, it took me about a year (working at night - thanks insomnia!). Much longer than I previously thought, but it required lots of tweaking to get good clusters along with good performance / scalability. Im very satisfied with the result and plan to adapt it to other news verticals as well as add functionality (comments, voting, etc) in the future. Glad that you like it! :)
- motoko 18y ago
  Are you looking for help? I may be interested, and this is something that I've been working on, too. Where are you located? Are you in the SF bay area?

shafqat 18y ago

Very nice... How did you do the clustering? Did you use an open source tool or build the algorithms yourself? I like the niche you picked - science news! Good luck.

FiReaNG3L 18y ago
Clustering is a 2 part process - calculate scores, then cluster. For the second part we used an open source perl API to a C library (very fast) for hierarchical clustering : http://search.cpan.org/~mdehoon/Algorithm-Cluster-1.38/ http://search.cpan.org/~mdehoon/Algorithm-Cluster-1.38/ I picked this niche because Im a scientist, mainly ;) I built the now #1 biology news website on the web (biologynews.net - #1 according to search engines) 3 years ago - Eureka Science News is the logical continuation of this effort.

pierrefar 18y ago

Is this an aggregator of press releases? If so, it's hardly science news: there is no critical thinking reviewing the results. It's more like science spin. At best, it's will be a good source of story tips for bloggers. I'm talking from experience as a science blogger. Please correct me if I'm wrong about your sources - I don't mean to offend. Also, your name is very similar to an existing science "news" service from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (the AAAS). They call theirs EurekAlert ( http://www.eurekalert.org/ http://www.eurekalert.org/ ), and the title of their home page is "EurekAlert - Science News". Because of this, you'll have a tough time ranking in the search engines since eurekalert.org is such an established site.

FiReaNG3L 18y ago
It's indeed targeted at non-scientific people; bloggers, highschool students, etc. It`s a press release aggregator, but it also cluster news from other sites, giving more sources for each story. However, the big plus is that it ranks stories in order of importance. And as for search engine ranking, Eurekalert is a public non profit service, so they dont market much. Science daily use their press releases and is #1 for 'science news', even if its horrible in usability / design. Of course, we intend to change that ;) But we know the competition is fierce in this niche.
- pierrefar 18y ago
  Have you seen PostGenomic and BPR3.org? They're doing something very interesting.
  - FiReaNG3L 18y ago
    Aware of PostGenomic (great initiative!), gonna check out BPR3 thanks for the link :)