Resultly Could Help You Spend Less Time on Google *And* Facebook

Kira M. Newman Jun 1, 2012 Tweet

Imagine getting an alert every time one of your Facebook friends posts engagement photos. Or when an iPad 3 goes on sale for less than $500. Or when a daily deal is offered for an Italian restaurant in your city.

Launched in May, Chicago-based Resultly lets you set these alerts and more: like vacation deals, news about your favorite topics, and job openings. It’s like a super-powered, hyper-targeted version of Google Alerts.

If Resultly gets reliable enough, we could start to rely on useful streams of information delivered right to us rather than searching and browsing all day:

“There’s a lot more information being created today than there was 5 or 10 years ago, and it’s being created so quickly that it’s becoming hard for these older search engines that are built on a more traditional model to handle that,” says founder Ilya Beyrak, who got his first programming job at age 14. “The whole search model really hasn’t changed, but the Internet greatly has.”

The Resultly team took a year to develop the technology behind the site, including over 10 pending patents. Instead of crawling and indexing the entire web like Google, it only crawls for specific terms after you do a search. The result is something like a Twitter stream, with the most recent results on top. To make sure information is available immediately, Resultly is working on an API that websites could use to funnel news or price updates right into the system. Right now, with the site in beta, some searches don’t return results because the relevant sites aren’t being checked yet.

Resultly stands at the intersection of social neworking and search. When you comment on a result in your stream, the comment also shows up for anyone else who sees that same result. Beyrak tells me they are also experimenting with friending, sharing and viewing what your friends search for, and following topics they follow.

Resultly is angel funded, with investor and Shark Tank star Daymond John on its board. Beyrak has a deep understanding of the evolution of information in society, so expect to hear more from Resultly in the future. In the meantime, sign up for their beta here.