Wordnik Launches Related Content Service In Open Beta

By: Talha Bhatti  |   December 10th, 2012   |   Business, News

Wordnik launched the open beta of its Related Content feature on December 5. The new service from the online dictionary lets website owners add the ability to recommend other content at the end of their own web page.

 

The content recommendation market already has a lot of players in the market including Outbrain. However, many believe that the services available currently are not good enough and other startups like Contextly have made their own recommendation widgets. Wordnik CEO Tony Tam also thinks that the company’s technology will differentiate it from the pack. He says that their application focuses on “what words mean” and will help provide better content recommendations.

 

The Wordnik system analyzes HTML tags for titles, looks at categories, and views body text to figure out which pages on the net have similar content. The recommendations either give back pages that are from the same publisher or from other members of the Wordnik network.

 

The startup’s new service has been attracting users very fast and according to the company the Related Content service has already been deployed on 1,000 blogs and boasts a 10 percent clickthrough rate. Related Content by Wordnik is free to use and the firm has provided it as a WordPress plugin or as a short JavaScript code for people that are not using WordPress for their blog. Tam added that the service will not slow down web page loading because the content indexes content externally and the results are sent back asynchronously.

 

Erin McKean, Wordnik founder, added that she was “really excited to help people in a way that’s not limited to alphabetical order. We want to be helpful to people at every scale,” McKean said. “At Wordnik.com, that scale is one word. With Related Content, it’s one blog post. And we can expand from there.”

 

Source: TechCrunch