It’s been more than a year since we first caught up with Resultly, a real-time social search engine which founder and CEO Ilya Beyrak confessed at the time was difficult to explain what it does.
Indeed, you have to use it to appreciate what it really does. But at its core, Beyrak said that Resultly is like Google Alerts for the whole Internet, which was about as succinct a synopsis as we could muster at the time.
It was an invite-only Web app when we last checked it out, but it was certainly an impressive proposition, one that let users create specific queries consisting of text attached to a certain category (e.g. Products, Finance, Travel and so on), while serving up real-time alerts based on their personal interests.
Since then, the Chicago-based company has rolled out its iPhone app, letting users follow everything from airfares and jobs, to daily deals and more.
Indeed, Resultly lets users set parameters to be notified when certain products reach a specific price point, and social network integration means they can receive alerts from Facebook and Twitter for very specific updates, such as baby photos posted to your Facebook News Feed (if that’s your thing).
Resultly 2.0
With 100,000 downloads to date, Resultly has just rolled out Version 2.0 of its mobile app, introducing what Beyrak calls a “completely different” product, redesigned and engineered for real-time, cross-category alerts.
When you first launch the app, you’ll see an all-new ‘My News & Social’ stream which displays information in a Flipboard-style magazine from the likes of CNN, Fox, CNBC and other news outlets.
To tailor this, you have to add some news and interests from the main ‘Category’ section, e.g. ‘Manchester United’ or ‘David Beckham’, and they will start showing up here.
To set up alerts, hit the ‘Plus’ button at the top right and choose your category. For travel, you can set departure times, return times, prices, non-stop and even more advanced parameters such as fare class and ages of the passengers.
You can set the frequency for each alert too. If you want to stick to the default frequency that applies to all alerts, you can do so.
While I was wondering why I wasn’t receiving any notifications, I had a look in the main menu under ‘notifications’ and found that it was set to ‘daily’, so I changed it to real-time.
A huge mistake, however, was setting the email alert to real-time too – a minute later, my inbox was flooded with hundreds of new emails. So I changed that to ‘never’, while keeping the mobile alerts to real-time.
It really is a great little app, but it’s only as great as you make it – you can set very specific parameters – based on your location – for housing, news, jobs, products, daily deals, books, social and media. And with the latest version of Resultly, you can also see what’s trending online.
For ‘media’, you can choose to search for keywords related to video and audio, across Metacafe, iTunes, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu and more.
Your alerts start showing up in your own personalized section, and you scroll left-to-right to see what results your search parameters have garnered. You can also choose to ‘favorite’ any Resultly content, pushing them into their own little silo for later.
All in all, Resultly is turning into a very useful, user-friendly, functional app. With built-in mapping for location-based alerts, and friends’ interests and results also showing up if you choose to connect through the app, this has the potential to be indispensable.
As with any such app, however, it needs to offer an Android version given that, well, it’s more than half the smartphone market. Beyrak says that this is indeed in the works, as is a Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 version.
The new version of Resultly is available to download now.
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