News

One of the Internet's greatest strengths is also what makes it so difficult to navigate: There is so much of it.

The number of websites in the world is said to range in the hundreds of millions, a number that is increasing rapidly. Even search giants such as Google are estimated to cover only a small fraction of the world's online information.

Efforts to aggregate the Internet's information aren't new – Google, Yahoo and other large Web operations have been running news aggregators for years. But for many companies and consumers, the news isn't enough – it's buzz that's important. That means discovering not only what's making the rounds on traditional media outlets but what's generating discussion on blogs and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

That's where Thoora, and similar companies, come in.

The Toronto-based startup launched a year and a half ago with the goal of creating a tool to monitor and display the hot topics on the blogosphere.

“It's a difficult problem. There was no good tool for non-bloggers to consume blogs online,” says Chul Lee, Thoora's chief technical officer and co-founder.

“The only solution was search, but when you do a search you have to know what you're looking for.”

Thoora soon expanded to monitor both Twitter and traditional news posts. The idea, Mr. Lee says, was to flip the traditional aggregator model on its head.

A service such as Google News will prioritize events and news, arranging them by impact, and then associate comment and reaction to each item. Thoora detects opinion and reaction first, and associates that buzz to the original news source.

In effect, the talk in the blogosphere represents opinion, Mr. Lee says, while talk on Twitter represents reaction.

The result is a hierarchy of daily items that sometimes overlaps with those of traditional aggregators but also often picks up stories that are generating buzz even though few media outlets have covered them.

(An indication of the kind of information Thoora sweeps up can be seen in its categorization process. Alongside “business,” “entertainment” and “politics,” prominent space is given to a category of stories marked “controversy.”)

Filtering these results from the online noise is a technically difficult one. Mr. Lee says Thoora has indexed 82 million blogs and 4,500 news sources, as well as Twitter.

“We're after everybody,” he says. “We have to deal with a very large amount of data.”

Measuring buzz online is a fast-growing field in large part because companies are increasingly focused on brand management – simply put, they want to find out what's being said about their products, and by whom. Regular Web users have also flocked to such sites as PopUrls.com, which lists the most popular links being passed around the Web on any given day.

Intelligence and national security organizations have also taken notice, investing in what is called “open source intelligence” – trying to find leads amid a mass of freely available information. Indeed, the investment arm of the CIA reportedly put money into just such a service recently.

As Thoora enters an increasingly competitive marketplace – it recently opened a beta version of its site to the public – the company is trying to differentiate its product. Thoora's founders caught a break last month when the company became just one of three Canadian firms invited to the TechCrunch50, a high-profile industry conference.

The next challenge for the startup is making money. Mr. Lee says Thoora is exploring the traditional advertising-based model. Another possibility is a paid premium service, or a dedicated business product for companies that have a heavy interest in monitoring web trends, such as media firms, Mr. Lee says.

Can Thoora differentiate itself from the rest of the marketplace? The company has already had to adapt almost from the moment of its inception.

Mr. Lee says he originally wanted to name the site Thera, but found that name was taken. So instead the company went the same route as Google and Yahoo.

“They say in Silicon Valley, if you have two Os in your name, you're more likely to be successful.”