Pressflip is a new blog search engine (it’s actually a relaunch of a site called Persai, which launched earlier this year). The idea is you do a search, train the engine by telling it which results aren’t interesting to you, and then wait for new results to come in over time.
The search results aren’t very deep compared to established blog search engines, there’s no RSS for the future search results that I can find and the training feature isn’t intuitive or explained clearly anywhere. Pressflip is far from launch ready, and under normal circumstances we’d add a page on Crunchbase for them and move on until it became interesting or went into the deadpool.
Persai/Pressflip has some notoriety because the founders, Ted Dziuba, Matt Kent and Kyle Shank, previously wrote a blog called Uncov, which focused primarily on tearing apart startups and the entrepreneurs behind them. Uncov has now been taken down, although a review is here) It was a blog that, while overly harsh at times, provided a good counterbalance to much of the sometimes overly positive coverage of startups. And, it was extremely funny.
But Uncov was just a hobby for the Pressflip founders as they raised small amounts of angel financing and worked away on their startup. Perhaps the workload from Pressflip became too much, or perhaps they realized that the startup they were building was turning into exactly the kind of thing that they would tear apart clinically on their blog, but they shut down Uncov just a few days before Persai first launched.
Pressflip/Uncov is a perfect illustration of The Man In The Arena quote from a 1910 Theodore Roosevelt speech given in Paris. It’s awfully easy to criticize the work of others but incredibly difficult to build something unique yourself. The Uncov guys are now in the arena, and failing. We’ll see if they have what it takes to take their hits and keep fighting.
Yeah, Pressflip sucks. Even the name sucks.
I tried searching for “NBA” and it gave me a bunch of stuff from February.
What’s such bullshit is that they completely retooled their concept just to get money to build a terrible and useless product. Emphasis on the tool.
FAIL
The last paragraph (and the link to the excellent Yossi Vardi post) is very appreciated by those of us who have been in the Arena for awhile.
Tried a search for Tiger Stadium. The results are up to date and look like they may be more accurate than what I might find on Google etc. Could have just gotten lucky though.
Will give this site an opportunity to do something special. Always looking for new things.
That Flip text site is kinda cool. Thanks Tech Crunch.
http://www.revfad.com/flip.html
Best
One word: FAIL
How many search engines can one stand?
There are RSS feeds for Interests.
Same her, did not like it at all.
There are RSS feeds just no direct links to them. View an interest and then click the RSS icon in Firefox/Safari.
wow, I cann’t believe how many search engines are out there.
Pressflip doesn’t have the resources currently to have every keyword imaginable be up to date like Google can. Pressflip should be judged based on how well it finds new content once you create an interest and how well the “flip” feature works.
I wonder if you even used the service, Mike. How is the text on the right “If you see something that doesn’t interest you, press flip” and the help page not “intuitive or explained clearly” enough for you?
took a look yesterday and my worry is in lack of incentive to continue to “human” refine results. it takes “some” effort to refine results…im not ready to commit that effort to this product/company
The only thing standing between Pressflip and Spammer autoclickers is exposure! Beware of them assessing their own success in terms of uniques.
If ‘PressFlip’ were a movie…it would be “Battle Field Earth”.
These days a service has to be “intuitive”; in this field searchers tend to be impatient and perhaps jaded, deliver on that first and the rest may follow
one word “deadpool”
persai launched?? damn i totally missed that.
i guess one of the lessons here is “karma is a bitch.”
but i like how they went from the toasty red/orange gradient persai logo to the calmer, cool, blue/aqua gradient in the pressflip logo.
Pressflop!
Ah, sweet sweet karma.
WHich blog search engines do you recommend for research?
Haha I’m guessing the Pressflip boys were hoping MA forgot about Uncov.
Is there anywhere I can find an archive of uncov stuff? It sounds pretty entertaining.
dunno, but if you find it please let me know.
Archive.org and Google cache have some of the articles.
I think they’ve done a terrible job in setting expectations, but I’m still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their site doesn’t blow me away, but it works in a limited, 0.5 sort of way, and it hasn’t broken.
Although we shouldn’t hold them to a lower standard because they’re Internet characters, I don’t think they should be held to a higher one, either.
+1 to what everyone else said about karma.
Given Ted’s persistently obnoxious comments on Valleywag about other companies and his (admittedly often funny) persistent slagging on startups in uncov, it’s delicious to see what he’s now birthed :).
Pot, kettle, fish, bicycles… fun!
Complete and utter FAIL!
Makes me wonder how the Dead2.0 guy and his start-up is going? It’s so easy to find fault and so hard to make art.
But I do wish this team the best. Anyone getting out there and making something new has my respect.
I heard that he doesn’t even have his tattoo. I know! And I’m all, “you gotta be shitting me”
I think what Pressflip has done is definitely a brilliant transformation. Their previous scheme wasn’t cool at all. I’m so glad it changed into a much more blogging-related service.
This is pretty decent. I think they are a bit hamstrung by their antipathy to building any network aspect to the site. It would be good to be able to see what other users are flipping & I also want the ability to approve, not just flip.
In short it has great potential and even as it stands now has a nice, simple design and is well implemented. I found it worked better for niche queries but that’s enough for now. A 3 man startup doesn’t have to be better than Google on day 1.
The commentors dumping on it are clearly carrying Uncov baggage - get over it dudes. It was a funny site. And Pressflip is a good one.
I don’t think anybody has Uncov baggage; everyone here loves Uncov. Pressflip is simply a useless service and had it been reviewed by Uncov it likely would have been slammed.
But at least it has no JavaScript, right?
A search engine that relies on user interaction is not going to show its full worth after half an hour.
There seems to be a general misunderstanding of how the site works.
Training only happens once an interest has been created.
Reading (clicking) on results is implicitly taken as positive feedback.
Flipping results is explicit negative feedback.
In my eyes 98% of the the content of the Internet is total shit. If I am expected to click “flip” for everything I don’t like, I’ll be training this mo-fo for the rest of my days. Incidentally, I entered Pressflip as a query. Nothing returned. I guess it does get something things right.
I dont think this is a good idea, too many ways to search blogs online…
>
brian
http://www.themostpowerfulcompany.com
I did a search for ‘pressflip’ and did not get any results. Come on Ted you should a hard coded TC in pressflip
:wink:
Blog search?! I used it as soon as I got the email. I didn’t get *hardly any* results from blogs. It was 95% from *news articles*! What did you search for? I tried to get FAIL out of it, but didn’t.
http://mikecane2008.wordpress......pressflip/
I’ll keep using it because I think they’re on the ball and it will only get better. Not the kind of faith I have in most things. OK, go back to play with your self-absorbing Twitter.
just like edgeio.com…
you’re just mad that you couldn’t hire ted
I like their logo
LOL WUT
Business people that use that quote from Roosevelt crack me up. Attempting to make a fast buck with venture capital backing has no relationship to the noble pursuits extolled in that speech. Nobody will live or die depending on the success or failure of some dumbass web 2.0 startup. I doubt that anyone would suffer so much as a missed meal if every startup whose CEO quoted that speech went bankrupt tomorrow. You are trying to make a boatload of money. This is not a struggle of statecraft, sacrifice, or moral character. It is just greed. Does this explain why you never hear quoted this line from that same speech? “The man who piles up a great fortune… should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable, he is an unworthy citizen of the community: that he is to be neither admired nor envied…”
in after…. ugh
At least their business model is obvious. Tell them your interests and give them your email address. TOS, conveniently missing.
Failtards, you are chomping at the bit so hard, your teeth are shattering. You can’t wait to declare fail, just because of who made the site. And there are can has RSS feeds, and any moron can figure out how to work this site. I am calling it, Arrington your review = fail - any valid point + your giant load you blew getting your stupid little Teddy quote in at the end. Teddy twittered from heaven and he said terrible job on this review.
FAIL here too: No results for hobnox.com opposed to over 120 on Twingly or 2087 on Technorati.