Although we’re still in Beta for a few more weeks — we have recently completed some major improvements to the back end and front end of BuzzTracker.com — we’re super excited about it and really want to hear from you on what you think.

When we initially launched our Beta at the end of August - we knew that our design as it stood then was not the final design - but our plan was to get the site launched, get feedback, and start learning. We used the first few months of the Beta launch to really hone our vision and get user feedback on the features, what worked and what didn’t. We then engaged with Rachel Cunliffe of cre8d design to work with us to re-design the site.

We think Rachel did a great job (thanks Rachel!) and has helped us accomplish our two major objectives for the re-design:

1. It passes the “Mom Test” — ie, will your Mom, who knows how to Google but could care less about web 2.0, understand and be able to use the site
2. Since BuzzTracker will always be about thousands of thousands of topics - can we devise an interface that allows for easy navigation and finding of topics of interest.

By focussing on the main articles found by our engine for a given topic, and de-emphasizing the blogs used to generate that result, we think we’re on the right track.

On the back-end, we completely swapped out our architecture to allow true scalability simply by adding more servers. We’re now using over 90,000 content sources (compared to 30,000 at launch). Without getting into too much detail — what this means from an end user is much faster and more timely results, our ability to publish more frequently, and ultimately enables our Create A Topic feature.

The Create A Topic feature will allow any end user to create and maintain a topic of their choice by essentially using all the back end levers at our disposal to fine tune their topic — including how far back in time does one want to search and test relevancy, the ability to apply boolean search terms, among other things.

We’ve really enjoyed using the new site and we hope you do to — one tip: if you have a hard time finding your topic in the navigation simply type it into the search box — it should come right up –

Look forward to hearing from you!