I was both sad and confused when I read that SearchFox was shutting down. I had hoped it might provide the next efficiency improvement in my feed reading through its personalized news reader. I wondered why they would shut down during what looks like a huge funding bubble without ever trying to attract a large user base. Now TechCrunch reports that Yahoo has acquired SearchFox’s assets and some employees. Greg Linden, founder and CEO of Findory, finds it odd, like I do, that SearchFox didn’t even move beyond closed beta before deciding to shut down. Unlike me, he has a theory as to why:
Perhaps they didn’t because they couldn’t. Building scalable personalization systems is hard. Techniques that work fine on toy problems completely break down at scale. The systems have to be designed from the start to do fast recommendations in real-time for hundreds of thousands of users.
Greg is in a good position to know about the difficulties of writing scalable personalization systems because of his work at Amazon and now at Findory. Findory offers a personalized news site with a “My Favorites” page that appears to overlap with SearchFox. It’s hard to know how similar they are since I never got to try SearchFox and I have yet to spend quality time with Findory, either the main page or the My Favorites page, so that it might know what I like.
I’m glad to hear that SearchFox is not entirely defunct. I hope some day I’ll get to try it. Meanwhile, maybe I should put more time into Findory, which is available today.
