Persai recommendation engine launches private beta

The folks behind snarky tech news/satire blog Uncov have decided to stop mocking startups and launch their own. Persai is a cross between a search engine and well, we're not really sure what else. Social bookmarking/discovery services like StumbleUpon, we suppose. But without the social aspect.

Here's how it works. You enter a couple of keywords for things you're interested in and Persai will search the web for articles and pages that might match your preferences. The more you use the page, the smarter it gets. If you click on a link, it figures that you'd like to see more pages like this one. If you ignore a link or click the reject button, Persai makes note of that as well.

The idea is that you can visit Persai on a regular basis to find articles you're interested in without entering any search terms after you've created your interests. But since the site seems to be laid out more like a search engine than a news page, we're not sure users will really treat it that way. Fortunately, you can also subscribe to RSS feeds for your interests, which seems like an incredibly useful feature. In theory, you'll be able to find articles from thousands of sites in your RSS reader without subscribing to thousands of RSS feeds. Of course, Persai's learning function will only work if you visit the main page, so you may have to use it for a little while before your RSS feed is really accurate.

Persai is currently in private beta, but you can request an invitation by signing up at the company's home page.

[via VentureBeat]

Tags: news, persai, recommendations