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Spotback frequently asked questions


What is Spotback?

How do I start? How do I help Spotback understand what interest me?

I would like to add a source to Spotback, what do I do?

What browsers is Spotback compatible with?

Where do I send feedback

What are the 'Settings' for?

What happens when I reset my profile?

Credits

Where is the Spotback Blog?

What does personal tag tracking do?

Where can I find your Privacy Policy and Terms of Use?

Where are you located and how can I contact you?

What is Spotback?

Spotback develops a unique personalization software that allows users to receive relevant content without actively searching for it. The proprietary personalization algorithms extracts relevant content from the overwhelming amount of information available online, making it a unique alternative to conventional information search.

Spotback focuses more on the relevancy of the content to the specific user than on the popularity of the content, addressing the “long tail” in an extremely efficient way.

Want to know more? Visit the Spotback blog.

How do I start? How do I help Spotback understand what interest me?

Rate stories and choose the news categories that interest. You can always reset your profile so do not worry about messin things up

I would like to add a source to Spotback, what do I do?

Please use the special form to submit a new source.

What browsers is Spotback compatible with?

We test the site on Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac and Linux and make sure it is compatible with all.

Where do I send feedback?

You can send us your feedback, suggest features, report bugs, tell us what you like (or dislike) and suggest more sources. You can also send us emails to: feedback@spotback.com

What are the 'Settings' for?

The settings are there to allow you to control different aspects of your user experience and Spotback behavior.

Enable animation: when a new story appears (usually as a result of the use of the 'More' menu or as a result of a story you rated high) it may appear as if it is sliding in (e.g. animation). Turning this off will cause the story to instantly appear with no effect.

Animation speed: this will allow you to control the speed of the animation. This feature is mostly useful for people with very slow or very fast computers.

Enable tooltips: Spotback comes with interactive information that appears when the mouse cursor is hovering above certain elements, such as: links, story titles, icons and more.

You can turn this off if you are not interested to see this information.

High grading brings new story: when turned on, if you grade a story higher than 2.5 on the story slider, a new personalized story will instantly appear.

Share my rating: one of the fun features of Spotback is the ability to see what stories other users rate positively. Turning this off will show other users a message that indicates that you chose not to share your story rating with others. We recommend that users will leave this option on.

No stories older than x: this will limit Spotback to show only stories that go back until the number of days you defined. This feature is limited to the 'Home' section.

What happens when I reset my profile?

The following information is deleted: the entire profile that our algorithms built from your use of Spotback, meaning that Spotback will try to learn about you from scratch.

The following information is not deleted: saved stories, user preferences, comments you made on stories.

Credits

Some of the icons on this site were created by extremely talented artists (or were inspired by the creation of those artists) to whom we would like to thank for sharing their creations with the rest of us mortals: Fam Fam Fam and Tango!

Where is the Spotback Blog?

You can find it here.

Personal tag tracker

The personal tag tracker is designed to track keywords (single or combination of two words) that you feel are important for you to monitor. Your personal tag tracker will highlight the tracked words for you everywhere in the stories you read in Spotback. Your choice of tracked words will also affect the personalization engine and will cause Spotback to take into account the tracked words when it chooses stories for you.

Important:
When, for example, you track the word "paris", you can get better results by limiting the searched categories. These limitations will yield:
- Entertainment / Gossip: Paris hilton...
- Sports / Bikes: Tour de France...
- General News: News happening in Paris/France
- Arts / Photography: Pictures related to Paris

More facts:
- Highlighting may be turned on and off.
- The personal tag tracker searches for the words you choose in the text and titles of the stories and is not limited to tags that where defined by the original author of the story.
- If you choose a combination of two words, the tag tracker will search only stories that contain both.

Limitations:
- Minimum 3 characters
- Anonymous account can track up to 5 words
- Registered users may track up to 20 words

 

Privacy Policy and User Agreement

You can read our Privacy Policy here and our Terms of Use here.

Where are you located and how can I contact you?

We are located in Hertzlia Industrial Center, Israel and you may contact us at info at spotback dot com