filtrbox: I Think I’m in Love with Vanity Search

filtrbox is one of those sites that I think might be interesting, sign up for, see a screen after set-up that says "check back in a few hours" and forget about since I'm constantly being distracted by something else. Thank goodness I went back to check it out because I think filtrbox may be my latest addiction.

Odds are if you are a blogger, marketer, PR rep, or evangelist, you have several alerts already set up for information about yourself, your company, your product, your clients, and/or your competitors. I usually have a few Google News alerts set, as well as Tweetscan and Summize searches with RSS feeds. The problem is that I have all these separate searches set up, which means I have all these article notifications coming into different email addresses at different times, and no way to really search through them without clicking through to the site.

Here's where filtrbox comes in. With a slick RIA for it's interface (all hail Flex!), it allows me to set up as many as 10 filters to crawl the web and find relevant content from the past 15 days (a Pro version, for $20 a month or $200 a year, allows up to 25 filters and 45 days of activity. I can add and subtract additional terms to streamline my filter, view the filters one at a time or all at once with color-coded headers, and see a graph showing how many articles appeared each day, helpful if you are tracking the results of a PR campaign or press release.

filtrbox also assigns a value to results for you, allowing you to set the sensitivity for the search results: do you want every little mention or the most relevant results? You can also assign each result your own rating, which fine-tunes the results. Each filter display can be sorted by source (blog, etc.), date, or score, and you can view either the top five results or all results, as well as choose between a title view with basic information about articles vs. a more detailed view with excerpts. You can see results on the web site, subscribe to them via RSS, and also have them emailed to you.

I can totally see myself upgrading to the Pro version as I need more filters and data, and the search results caught everything I found via my Google alerts, plus a few that those missed. For those out there who need a lower-end method of tracking buzz, I think filtrbox is the one to beat.