DayPop

About DayPop

Daypop is a current events search engine. Daypop crawls the living web at least once a day to bring you the latest information relevant to your searches.

The living web is composed of sites that update on a daily basis: newspapers, online magazines, and weblogs. Weblogs are a new form of personal journalism. Think of them as opinion columns or slices of life. Newspapers give you the international headlines and weblogs give you both a subjective view of current events and a personal view of the author's life.

Currently, Daypop indexes over 59000 of the best news sites and weblogs on the net every day.

The search algorithm takes into account relevance of the page based on several factors. Accounting for word placement, where the word occurs in the document, can lead to improved search results. The most obvious example of this is in returning documents with search terms in their titles.

Nearness of search terms is also taken into account and it is intuitively obvious that the closer your search terms occur near each other in the document, the more likely that document is relevant to your search.

Daypop gives pages an "Authority" or "Importance" score but doesn't take this score into account when returning search results since there is the danger of popularity outweighing relevance. Since Daypop uses a human-edited list of sources in the index, it generally hasn't been necessary to take this importance into account when returning search results to give relevant results. Daypop only uses this score to perform explicit ranking of authority of pages relative to each other as on the Top Weblogs page. In the future, Daypop may make use of authority in ranking search results depending on some tests on relevance.

Daypop treats hyperlinks as highly important conferrers of authority. That's why there is no latency between when a page is crawled and when link information for that page is available. This allows Daypop to perform near real-time analysis of links, which are at the core of many of the analysis tools that Daypop offers.