Written by editor
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Search technology previously available only to the U.S. government and major corporations has been ported to the iPhone. The first application focuses on political news and allows citizens to keep track of U.S. politicians by producing highly relevant, targeted news articles about the elected official.
pTracker, LLC today announced the launch of “politicoTracker”, a News Discovery Tool for the iPhone that lets users find relevant, real-time news about most U.S. federal, state, and local elected officials. This app employs advanced object-based search technology that additionally allows the user to instantly cross-search, or “group” political news into various topics, efficiently highlighting relationships between the politician and other interests.
This ability to drill down and cross-reference news search results is known as “news discovery”, as it allows users to discover facts that they would not have known to look for otherwise. politicoTracker is the only app for the iPhone to use this patent-pending technology, but is only the first of several apps pTracker intends to develop for mobile device users, with each app focused on a particular subject.
politicoTracker ships with a comprehensive database of U.S. Members of Congress (Senators and Representatives), and Executive Elected Officials and Cabinet Members, plus State Senators, Congressmen, Councilmen, and Governors – over 6600 names in all. Users can filter the list to quickly select a specific person, or use the “Favorites” feature for “3 taps to get results” access to the politician’s news.
politicoTracker allows users to answer questions such as these (presented with recent examples):
Just group the politician’s news by Publications to find out. |
… and many others that would take an inordinate amount of time to research with a traditional search engine.
Although the latest electoral season has passed, pTracker still sees a public interest in easily following what our political leaders are up to. “Given the growing importance of government in our economy and in our businesses, it is more important than ever to be able to easily cross-search for our elected officials against various industries, issues, and organizations,” says Erwin Mazariegos, founder of pTracker. “We are pleased to be able to bring this capability to the mobile mass market, and we are very excited about our future products as well.”
pTracker licensed the core search technology from Llesiant Inc, also based in Austin. Llesiant’s object-based search technology is fundamentally different from traditional text-based search engines. When Llesiant’s system receives and processes incoming news articles, it tags (or creates “meta-data”) about every “object” it finds within the article. Then when a user later conducts a search for one of those objects (in this case, a particular politician), this meta-data is used to find only those articles that reference that specific person. The outcome is highly-targeted, relevant results without the off-topic links of a traditional text-based search engine. And because most news articles will contain references to more than one thing (or object), cross-searches on multiple meta-data are likewise extremely fast and accurate.
Llesiant’s technology is currently in use by U.S. lawmakers, senatorial and congressional committees and offices, and Fortune 500 corporations and major law firms. The news sources include over 25,000 global publications, so a wide array of journalistic and cultural perspectives are available. Because live news streams are processed on an ongoing basis, results are available to politicoTracker users in real-time.
