New Search Option Surfaces

alertpedia.com, a service that provides regular alerts on topics including real estate, was listed as one of India’s 10 best product technology startups at the 2009 HeadStart & Compute conference. The website was co-founded by entrepreneur Dharani Nandakuru after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. alertpedia.com users choose a topic they wish to receive alerts about, and the website then emails them results at regular intervals.

Real estate is currently listed as a new category on the website. Users can create alerts based on zipcode, price, type of property, and number of bedrooms and bathrooms.

A statement on alertpedia.com has this to say about the creation of the service: “None of us were directly affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, but we felt the impact at a profound level. This is the Information Age and we lost 300,000 people because they were not alerted in time? Think about it.”

A review by cnet.com’s Sharon Vaknin said that while alertpedia.com can be practical, it does have a few weaknesses: “Users should be careful about what filters they choose in their searches. A very general filter, or search term, could lead to endless results. On the other hand, a very specific term could minimize results and render the service useless.”

Google Alerts also provides an alerts service that searches either comprehensively or in categories such as news, blogs, videos or groups. In an interview on mybangalore.com, Dharani Nandakuru addressed the similarity to Google Alerts, saying: “Unlike search word-based alert services like Google Alerts, Alertpedia handles semantic and structured alerts (e.g., tell me when an earthquake of magnitude above 7 happens in Indonesia) and hence sends more relevant alerts to users. Alertpedia is optimized for Alerts because that is our only focus.”

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