Real-time search engine Topsy announced Thursday that it has closed a $15 million Series C round from all current investors, including BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund, Scott Banister and Western Technology Investments.The latest round doubles Topsy’s total funding, which had previously been made up of a $900,000 seed round from angel Scott Banister in January 2008, an $11 million Series A led by BlueRun in December 2008, and a $3 million Series B from Western Technology.
When Twitter started getting huge back in early to mid-2009, we saw a host of startups launching in the real-time search space, vying for consumer and investor attention by selling the idea of searching social results. A few of those original startups have since dropped the idea and pivoted: Scoopler has rebranded as JustSpotted, an unfortunate but inevitable service that lets users keep tabs on where their favorite celebrities are in real-time, and OneRiot is now a social advertising network.
Topsy, however, has stuck with its roots, focusing completely on providing the best possible real-time social search experience.
The site’s design is Spartan, like Google, but informative about what’s happening right now, like Techmeme or Twitter. Whereas Google’s PageRank looks at a page’s authority or relevance to determine when to return it in search, Topsy’s algorithms focus on searching the “social Web,” that is, Twitter.
Topsy Influence measures the likelihood that, each time you say something, people will pay attention.Influence for Twitter users is computed using all historical retweets: millons of real, public statements indicating who’s listening to whom. On our website, roughly the top 0.2% most influential of all Twitter users are tagged “Highly Influential”, and “Influential” tags appear for the top 0.5% most influential Twitter users.
What’s challenging for Topsy is sifting through the 100 million tweets sent every day to find the most relevant content for users.
With today’s considerable new funding round, Topsy has the financial clout to continue fighting the competition, most notably TweetMeme.
