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December 9, 2005

Quick update on FastContent

Filed under: Blog & Site Automation — macroking @ 12:56 pm

Yesterday I wrote about FastContent, a cool little utility for grabbing articles in quantity and formatting them for your websites.

I am digging into it a bit deeper, and have found one annoying limitation. It does not seem to handle multi-word keywords as a single phrase. For example, a search for red widgets seems that it would reveal articles with EITHER red OR widgets ANYWHERE in the article. This is a real drag… putting the phrase in quotes does not seem to change anything, nor does adding a plus sign between keywords, such as red+widgets.

I’m going to continue to experiment with it, as even if I have to manually scan the articles for related ones, it’s faster than the Orwell approach has been for me. Still, this seems like a glaring oversight, and I may contact the product’s support to see what they say about such a phrase matching feature. The articles sites themselves can do it, so FastContent should be able to as well!

3 Responses to “Quick update on FastContent”

  1. Randal Says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 7:19 am

    Just curious…did you contact product support to find out about the multi keyword limitation? The product looks very interesting but I agree with you regarding your finding.

    Thanks.

    Randal

  2. macroking Says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 11:21 pm

    Hi Randal,

    I haven’t gotten a definitive answer on this yet, but as soon as I hear anything I’ll be sure to write about it. I really like FastContent but honestly, the whole overall process of looking for articles for my sites is just so dull and time consuming. I think I’m leaning more and more towards some sort of dynamic article scraping system, but of course would like to see it added to NicheCreator first!

  3. macroking Says:
    December 15th, 2005 at 3:21 pm

    Got an answer, and it’s a good one!

    FastContent does not seem to handle multi-word keywords as a single phrase.

    Yes,good point.
    I will add better handling for multi-word phrases, that is not a problem at all.

    Also the ability to limit the search to article titles ONLY seems extremely important.

    This can be done on directories that are searched directly and that support that kind of search, for searches done through Google that can not be achived.
    But better multi-word keyword handling should return more relevant results.

    Version 1.9.0.7 with improvments will be out on 19 of December (next monday).

    So watch for it!

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