Development Seed Blog

Lately we’ve been working on some aggregation tools that plug into Drupal websites. Eventually these tools will let you enter RSS feeds from any website that has one into your own website and have your website collect, store, and display the content. Once on your site, every piece of content will be able to be searched by keyword. So for example with these tools you could create an up to the minute guide on the latest happenings on, well, anything – water pollution in rivers, Brazilian rubber plantations, or HIV prevention programs in Africa. Pretty cool, huh? Let me back up and explain how it all works.

If you’ve ever read an article on Yahoo! News, you’ve probably noticed that some words are also links and look like . If you click on one of these links, a window pops up with search terms related to that word. If the word was "Apple" and it’s an article about computers, you’ll get search results about Apple computers. But if the article is about pies, you’ll get search terms about apples and other fruit.

What does this is Yahoo’s Y!Q – Search. When it looks for search results it also takes into account the context of the text around it. What this means is that you get search results that are relevant to the word you read and not its homonym. Another application that works with this is Yahoo Terms, which extracts key terms from within a body of text. What does this mean? Yahoo Terms can free tag.

Tagging gives a story, an image, or anything else a couple of keywords to help define what the thing is all about. So, if you've found an article that talks about HIV/AIDS prevention programs in Africa, you can bookmark it with del.icio.us and give it the tags HIV/AIDS, sexual health, and Africa. Later when you want to write a blog post about AIDS in Africa or compare the different type of HIV prevention programs in use you can go to your del.icio.us bookmarks, look at your tags, and find the article you need without having to run a Google search on it.

We’re using the new Yahoo Terms module in the aggregation tools we’re working on to let you search all this content by keyword. Once we’re done, you’ll be able to plug in a bunch of websites that feature content about AIDS in Africa or any other topic and have your website slowly build you a book of current information on the topic that’s fully sortable by keyword.

You can take it for a test drive here.

We have had a great time working very closely with Pierre Wielezynski from the World Bank specking out this functionality. The World Bank has sponsored the work on this module and is doing a lot of smart Drupal development under Pierre's leadership.