Feedster was founded in March 2003 and is now a 18-person company based in San Francisco. In May 2005, the Company closed a Series A round of venture financing The investment was led by Selby Venture Partners, a leading early-stage venture firm in Silicon Valley. Feedster benefits from the ways that blogging is changing the Internet’s basic building blocks – from unstructured web pages to structured documents.
As blogging became mainstream in 2004, it was accompanied by RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which is the structured data format used originally to syndicate blogs and news, but is now spreading quickly to mainstream commercial use in job postings, e-commerce, and enterprise applications.
Feedster’s harnessing of RSS is changing search and the expectations of Internet searchers. Timeliness is the most obvious benefit. Feedster offers a fresh index from millions of sources several times an hour. While traditional search engines may provide updated information at a similar pace, since they are search HTML rather than XML documents. In order to exploit the far-reaching advantages of a purely XML-generated and delivered Internet search engine, Feedster has made significant changes and improvements to each part of the search engine workflow. From the early head start we enjoyed due to our proprietary RSS feed discovery crawler to the sustainable advantages we expect from our patentable applications and RSS server indexing technology, search server architecture, scaled XML feed delivery, and first-mover status, Feedster is redefining precision, timeliness and relevancy for Internet search.