Ask HN: A tool that tracks various websites for keywords and give you updates?

2 points·laurent123456··1 comment

I'm looking for a tool that would search a number of websites for certain keywords and show me the aggregated results on a page.

For instance, something that would use Hacker News, Lobsters or Reddit own search engine and return the aggregated results. You can then check the results from time to time and see if there's any update.

Any idea if something like this exists?

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To the extent that any of those sites have RSS feeds, you can do something like that with our project Neddick[1]. You can define a "channel" which is fed by n RSS Feeds (and also Twitter accounts and/or IMAP email accounts) to build an aggregate view. Then you can define a "filter" for the channel based on various criteria. We also have real-time notifications using the same kind of criteria, where you can receive an email, an XMPP message, post to a webhook, etc.

It's still somewhat beta'ish, but most everything I just described is working today.

We're working on turning this into a SaaS offering, but that's not quite ready yet... if you wanted to use it, you'd have to self-host. I hope to have a Docker image ready soon, which would simplify deployment.

Sadly the documentation on deployment is a little out of date. If you wanted to give it a try, basically create a postgres database named neddick_dev, clone the repo, install Grails 3.3.6, and then run the runneddick.sh script from in the repo directory. You'd also want to tweak the neddick.home property defined in runneddick.sh to point somewhere meaningful.

We don't currently have any built-in support for leveraging a site's built in search mechanism, but I could see it being a useful addition. If somebody wanted to contribute that kind of functionality, I'd be happy to include it. When we would get around to building it ourself is hard to say.

[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

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