How Apture’s Context Search Can Dramatically Improve Your Users’ Site Experience.

Late afternoon at WordCamp SF 2010 I had a chance meeting with Tristan Harris and Steven Kan at the Genius Bar.

Tristan is the Co-Founder of Apture, a revolutionary context search plugin for bloggers and content publishers. Tristan was ranked #16 in Inc Magazine’s 30 Top 30  – America’s Coolest Young Enterpreneurs (2009). Steven Kan is the Vice President of Operations and Marketing at Apture.

The Apture plugin seeks to improve your users’ experience on your site and enrich their experience by present rich media in context search results all without leaving the main page.

Tristan gave me a detailed demo of the Apture Plugin and later shared his thoughts on the value Apture is providing for bloggers, publishers and the site visitors.

Interview With Tristan Harris – Co-Founder of Apture.com

Let’s just start with your product. Tell me a little bit more Apture.

Tristan: So we started the company, Apture, to build products that allow for a frictionless experience of getting more information and sharing information.  We’ve created this way in which readers, once you install the Apture plugin on your site, like a WordPress plugin or a Blogger plugin, it’s just 1 line of code, and what it does is let readers come to the site and select anything they want to know more about on the page.  They just highlight with their mouse and then they can click ‘search’ And the search is done on the page, instantly.

So, instead of leaving the page or opening a tab and finding and opening 20 tabs on Google, the user can get all the answers they want from your site.  So, basically, it really increases the amount of time that they spend on the site and it drops the bounce rate out to Google again.  So, you can open up movie trailers, you can open up LinkedIn profiles, you can come across an actor’s name and you can get photos of the actor, you can see who they’re dating—you can keep going as deep as you want, but you never leave the page that you’re on.

Okay, and if I’m like a professional blogger, or someone who’s trying to make a living off of niche topics or a news website and I have affiliate accounts and such, how does the plugin help me?

Tristan: So, we have a configuration where you can set up your Amazon affiliate code, and so whenever users discover or navigate to Amazon content, we’ll give them the full experience of Amazon—you know, the product reviews, the summary text, they can open up the book-cover, like a wide, nice full-screen photo of the book-cover.  And the most important thing is when they click “Buy Now” it uses your Amazon affiliate code.  So, all the times in which someone comes to your site—and say you write about movies all the time and someone copies the name of an actor, they hit Control+C and they open up a tab and they go to Google, but when they do that, Google and Amazon make money, not you.  And so what this does, you can actually see, when I highlight “The Hurt Locker” and I hit Control-C it actually does the search right here. And if there’s an Amazon result and people buy, you’ll make money.  So the blogger gets to earn the revenue from all of the transactions.

Okay, Awesome! And is the search real-time?

Tristan: The search is real-time, yes.  It also searches your site, all the content from your site and from around the web.  It’s like Google plus everything else.  It’s like people can navigate Wikipedia articles, they can get Youtube videos, they can see images about movies or people or anything they want and it searches your whole site.  So whenever you have a match and you’ve written about that topic, we’ll actually recommend it to the user in real-time.

Great! How much does all this cost?

Tristan: It’s free. And you can got to Apture.com to get it for your site.

Okay, and how do I install it? Is it fairly quick and easy?

Tristan: Sure, we have one line of code that you just copy and paste into your site template. It should go in the footer HTML so that it loads after your page code loads.  And the plugin loads really fast and it just gets people access to all the information they want, so they never need to leave your site.

“As a publisher, the second you fail to provide the information to the reader once, they’re going to leave your site, because it’s so easy for them” – Tristan.

So I can use it on pretty much any blog.  Like, it’s not restricted to WordPress only.  Can I can use it on Blogger, tumblr and others?

Tristan: Yeah, any site—Blogger, MovableType.  We have some really large customers like the New York Times and Washington Post and we have a bunch of small blogs that use it as well.

This Time Magazine’s bar you are showing here for the demo,is it customizable?

Tristan: Yes, you can customize the apture plugin. So part of the new product is this bar that you can put on the top of your website, and it’s branded.  You can set up the color and the design so you can go to Apture.com, there’s a button that says “Design A Bar Now“. And you can upload a logo so you can have a site logo—you can do that.  You can set the color and the style of the bar to match your template.  And it only comes in when people want to search for more information or when they scroll down the page.

Can you tell me a little bit more about your company, too?  Like, when did you guys come together and how long you’ve been doing this?

Tristan: Yeah, we started the company about two and half years ago, and we were originally Stanford graduate computer science students who stopped out of school to start the company.  And we were working with this group of journalists called the Knight Fellows of Stanford, and these are like kind of distinguished journalists from around the world, and we wanted to come up with a better way of doing online story-telling—just being able to present media and create a more interactive way of doing story-telling and communicating information on the web.

And we came up with all these sort of integrations with these different APIs—these different media services.  So when people want photos and videos and Wikipedia, today they always leave the site to go get that information.  And, as a publisher, the second you fail to provide the information to the reader once, they’re going to leave your site, because it’s so easy for them, it’s just so easy for them to open a tab.

And so what we’re trying to do is say, let’s make it so that whenever readers want more information, you get to provide it for readers.  And so we started off working primarily with news organizations and then we’ve kind of expanded to blogs and product sites and just letting people get information—anything that they want.

And where are you guys based?

Tristan: San Francisco—downtown San Francisco near the BallPark.

How long did you say you’ve been doing this?

Tristan: Two and a half years.

Great! Good Luck and thanks for the interview. It was nice meeting you and Steve.

Tristan: Nice to meet you! Thank you very much!