Trapit – Personalized Search App that Works for You 24/7

Trap.it is a new personalized search app that originally came out of a $200 million DARPA artificial intelligence project called CALO or Cognitive Assistant That Learns and Organizes. It’s a sister company of SIRI, the online “concierge” that was acquired by Apple last year.  The app aims to take personalized search to new heights and depths to become your “Pandora for content” and deliver content that’s tailored to your interests.

Trapit works for you 24/7, capturing what you want, and serving it up fresh and spam-free all day long. You are not the crowd. Whatever topics grab your interest, it discovers the best stuff just for you and saves it for when you’re ready.

It scour the web on your behalf, 24/7, organizing the best, most relevant content into individual topic-based “traps” for easy consumption. Traps can be based on current affairs or trending topics, personal interests or projects, companies or people, teams, towns, events and more. Maybe it’s a lifelong passion your favorite hobby or sports team or a hot issue of the day.

Trap.it refines each of your traps based on both your explicit input and implicit actions, such as content you delete, to deliver the most relevant content based on your needs and tastes. You can set up as many traps as you’d like, based on everything from broad categories to extremely niche and specific information. Each trap contains a rich ontology that is unique to you, not a rehash of search results culled from other people.

You can consume your traps in three main ways:

1. [advt]A tile view where each article found is presented within a “cube” with an image and either summary text or a short excerpt of the content.
2. A list view that will be more familiar to you if you like to consume RSS feeds in a reader;
3. A page-by-page view where you can click on left or right arrows placed on either side of an article you’ve accessed to allow browsing of your trap content.

The web is an echo chamber. You see the same articles and videos over, and over again. Your individual preferences are overlooked by sites and services that take a one-size-fits-all approach, and they privilege the same hand-full of overhyped articles and videos above all else. It’s much too hard to find the good stuff.

Trap.it has worked hard to make the site and the presentation of content approachable and deceptively simple, but the technology behind the interface is sophisticated, robust and scalable. It can distill and filter vast amounts of content produced daily on the Web into a highly targeted and constantly refined set of traps that you can access any time so you don’t just get the same old articles and posts you see retweeted in your Twitterstream. The folks at Trap.it hope you use their site for more than just professional work or research but for personal passions as well, from gardening to cooking to travel.