PlanetEye

November 23rd, 2007

New in Beta: PlanetEyeBot

By Juan Gonzalez

The most important feature we are releasing this week is a little application we call the PlanetEyeBot. Its objective is to crawl the web searching for geotagged information that can be added to our map. Just as any other web crawler, its mission is to find pages on the web that have information that may be relevant to our users. What makes it unique is the fact that only pages with good geotagged data are analyzed and instead of keeping a full copy of every page, it only stores the information that is necessary to identify such data point on a map, typically the address, lat/long pair, brief description and a URL to the source.

How is this information going to be used by PlanetEye? Each geotagged location we find out there will become a point in our map or, if it is already there, finding more web references to the same location will make it more popular in our map. And even as we continue to add thousands of new data points each week, our MediaDots technology will keep the performance of the map steady. Soon, with enough data, our map will provide an accurate representation of the places around the world that get the most attention, whether through specialized ranking sites (Wine Spectator), sophisticated bloggers (Gridskipper) or specialized travel resources (Travel and Leisure Magazine). Of course, we are making sure that only content that is relevant to our travel-centric mission is added.

If you are a webmaster, you should know that our crawler identifies itself as a crawler with the following signature: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PlanetEyeBot/0.1; +http://www.planeteye.com) For everyone else, we will have a page dedicated to showcase the sources we cover to make sure our users can grow confident that we’re only adding information that will be relevant to their travel related activities. Finally, every place in our map will have its own page where we will list the many web sources that referred to it. In the case of an award-winning restaurant, chances are the list will be long.

On a different front, we continue to improve the usability of our map. This week we are introducing an “always-on” media panel that will eliminate the confusion that the collapsing version created. No matter where you are, you will always see a selection of the top ranked elements in that area of the map.

It is only one row of photos, but we believe that making the interaction easier was a priority. Notice the new message at the top of the map indicating how many photos are shown in the media panel out of the total of photos available in the current area of the map. A quick way to see how many photos we have at any given time is to zoom out to view the entire world. The count should be accurate… and FAST!

One Response to “New in Beta: PlanetEyeBot”

1. PlanetEye » Blog Archive » New in Beta: City Guides Says:
   December 15th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
   

   [...] is run for the Attractions, Hotels & Restaurants listings, except that any references that the PlanetEyeBot keeps finding around the web will influence the ranking of each place. We call it the [...]

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