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How To Be a Better BrowserCan a new filtering program cure the Web's information overload?

By Paul BoutinPosted Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008, at 3:48 PM ET

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Slate's new and improved RSS feeds can be found here. In 2004, Paul Boutin was overjoyed by the arrival of RSS, which promised to aid him in sorting through a glut of online news sources. Jack Shafer applauds the New York Times reader as a revolution for online newspapers. He also thinks Google News encourages readers to access a more diverse well of news sources. Not just addicted to online news? Michael Agger tackled the perils of e-mail addiction. Slate also peruses the blogosphere every weekday to deliver what we think are the posts you should be reading.

After setting up my "Barack Obama" page, I created a second Persai account with the same exact settings. This was my control unit for the experiment—I did no reading or rejecting on it. After a week of heavy clicking on the first account, I compared the two to see if the filters did their job.

I'm ready to pronounce Persai most of the way there. It figured out quickly that I wanted articles about how well Obama was doing against Hillary Clinton, not puff pieces about an "unstoppable train." It also figured out that I enjoy reading pieces that trash Obama. (I live in San Francisco and get an earful of Obama-mania all day. A guy needs to unwind.) Persai reduced the number of Huffington Post articles, in my mind, from way too many to just a few. Pushed to the top: "Nasty Clinton-Obama Fight Descends to Plagiarism Accusations." Cut from the list: "Yes, Obama Has Substance to Match the Charisma Thing."

Persai took away the feeling of being overwhelmed by hundreds of new headlines every morning. Its best quality is the ability to cull stuff I'm sick of, such as the tediously partisan Hillary Project. It's also good at helping me overcome my biases, finding articles from sites I thought I was sick of until I clicked—that's you, Salon. But in its beta version, Persai replaces too many articles with not enough. The company claims to index 700,000 news articles and blog posts a day, but I had trouble getting more than two dozen Obama items daily. I can get a lot more by setting up an Obama news alert on Google News.

Second, Persai only sorts articles by when they were published—the newest goes first—rather than choosing a top story based on its relevance to my interests. On Tuesday, Google put the New York Times' brand-new report on the Obama-Clinton plagiarism flap at the top of its screen. Persai left that story off my pages, even on the untouched control account, and led with an article about Obama's popularity in Japan. That's where the program's anti-social nature can backfire—it doesn't care that a huge number of people will read and talk about the Times story. It simply scraped through the article as if it were any other piece or blog post.

Finally, Persai still isn't as smart as I am when it comes to choosing what to read. I want to read stories that deal with Britney Spears' mental illness but don't want to read anything about her custody battle. While I can figure out which Britney pieces will appeal to me by scanning headlines, Persai isn't sophisticated enough yet to tell the difference—even if a piece touches on her mental health for one sentence, Persai will grab it for me.

Here's an idea: What if I could run Google News' more structured search results through Persai's things-I-hate filter? That would bring me popular articles that matched a keyword or two while also culling the stuff that Persai knows I'll hate. After a week of clicking "reject," I came to realize something about myself. It's not that there's too much information on the Internet. It's that there are too many painfully bad essays about Barack Obama. Take those away, and I'm happy to pore through what's left.