Now that finding needles in the web's haystack has been made easier - thanks to Google and its search-engine peers - the next challenge is to find a better way of sifting through the mountains of news content available online. The choice has been between using human editors such as Yahoo's news pages to do the filtering, or an automated aggregator such as Google News. But neither is a satisfactory solution for providing easily updated, tailor-made news.
The better answer may be the approach taken by a news aggregator website named Reddit.com, the brainchild of two 22-year-old graduates from the University of Virginia, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian.
Reddit seeks to tap the "wisdom of crowds" means of gauging popularity - as exhibited by the social bookmarking site del.icio.us - by offering a front page of links to articles submitted by users, with individual users then able to vote for or against each article. The voting has two important roles: first, items are promoted or demoted from the site's front pages depending on how popular they are with readers; second, by voting, users are training their individual filters, in the manner of Amazon's book recommendations, to guess their preferences and serve up other news items that will interest them individually. Users who post popular items build up "karma points", which gives greater weight to their future postings, and vice versa: unpopular posters get slipped down the running order.
Reddit.com is certainly not the first to harness collaborative filtering: sites such as Kuro5hin and Slashdot pioneered user-driven content, with Digg.com a more sophisticated recent version. But while those sites are primarily interested in technology news, Reddit is aimed at general readers.
The site's clean lines and simple usability have drawn flattering comparisons with Google. Since Google executives remain unhappy with Google News, it is no surprise to hear that people at Mountain View are looking closely at Reddit's techniques. The prize of becoming the web's first "must-visit" site, the Google of news, is a huge one.
The site has only been running since mid-July, after Huffman and Ohanian were among the first group of start-ups supported by the innovative Y Combinator seed fund, set up by net guru Paul Graham and others. The pair have received further funding, with the site now being visited by about 12,000 users each day.
Graham remains a big fan: "I never look at any news site now except Reddit ... Reddit's like an RSS feed for the whole web, with a filter for quality."
· If you'd like to comment on any aspect of Technology Guardian, send your emails to tech@theguardian.com