This page offers help and instructions for using the PubSub Sidebar. For more information, click here.

Welcome to PubSub, the world's first Internet-scale Matching Engine.

Whereas conventional "retrospective" search engines can only return results from pages that have already been indexed and filed away, the PubSub Matching Engine matches our users' queries to new items as they appear on the Internet, in real time. We call it "prospective search". To put the PubSub system to work for you, just tell us what you want to be on the lookout for, and we'll notify you whenever it is mentioned in any of over 6,000,000 Weblogs, in press releases, newsgroups, or any of the other sources we are monitoring (we're adding new ones all the time).

The PubSub Sidebar extension for Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Firefox is coming to the browser stores soon.

The PubSub Sidebar allows you to see items arriving from your PubSub subscriptions in real time, just as soon as they are matched. It runs as a separate frame in your IE browser; once it has been installed you can show it or hide it by clicking the PubSub button on the toolbar, or by clicking the menu item View -> Explorer Bar -> PubSub Sidebar.

Accounts and Subscriptions

When the application loads for the first time, the default username and password ("sample") point to a sample PubSub account. You can use this account to try out the Sidebar, but if you have any PubSub subscriptions you can view them instead (it doesn't cost anything to create an account; just go to www.pubsub.com to find out how). If you already have a PubSub.com account, but don't have a password, you can get one at www.pubsub.com/account. Once you have a PubSub account, you can create and delete simple subscriptions directly through the sidebar. More detailed subscriptions can be created through the PubSub website.

Using the Sidebar

Connecting: When you first open the Sidebar, you will see the login page. To connect, click the Sign In button. The Sidebar then connects to the PubSub server and loads your subscription list (this can take a few seconds if there is a lot of message traffic).

Once the connection is established, the Sidebar will load a list of recent messages (currently this "history" contains the 24 most recent messages for each subscription). New messages will then be added to the top of the list as they arrive.

Message Format: Messages for different topics have different formats. For example, a Weblogs-topic item shows three lines: the entry's title, the name of the Weblog, and a timestamp. Clicking the title will open the story in the main browser window, and clicking the second line will open the Weblog's home page. Each topic has its own format.

The Main Page

The Subscription list: The drop-box at the top of the form contains a list of your subscriptions, and a default entry labeled All New Messages. To view only messages associated with a particular subscription, select its name from the list, and click the button to the right of the box. Otherwise, select All New Messages to see all incoming messages as they arrive.

Highlights: When you click a Sidebar entry to view it in the main browser window, the system will highlight the words in the webpage that match your subscription keywords. To turn this feature off, click the Highlight icon. To turn highlighting back on, click the icon again.

Hide Details: Click this to hide all but the first line of each item. Clicking again puts things back to normal.

Pause the Display: When the application is displaying subscriptions that generate a lot of matches, the messages may scroll down the screen so quickly that it is impossible to view the data, follow the links, etc. Clicking the Pause button will freeze the display so that the currently displayed messages can be examined at leisure. To resume normal message-scrolling, click the button again. Note: the Sidebar retains only the last 24 messages for each subscription. If more messages than this arrive while the display is paused, only the 24 newest messages will be shown when the display resumes.

Disconnect: Clicking this when you are logged in will disconnect the Sidebar from the PubSub server and take you back to the login screen. Use this to switch accounts, if you have more than one.

Create/Delete Subscriptions: As you might already have guessed, this button lets you create or delete subscriptions. More below.

Help: Click this to see the Sidebar instructions.

Managing Subscriptions

When you click the icon you will see a new page with two buttons -- one for creating new subscriptions, and one for deleting existing subscriptions. If you click the Create button you will see the following page:

The droplist at the top of the page contains a list of all of the available topics. Enter the keywords for your new subscription in the Keywords field (follow the Learn More link to learn about the correct sysntax), think of a title for the subscription and enter it in the Subscription Title field, click Create, and you're done. The Sidebar will inform the PubSub system of your request, and upon confirmation, you will be returned to the main page, where you can now see your new subscription in the drop-down list. Messages from the new subscription will arrive just as soon as items matching your subscription's keyword list appear on the Web and are processed by the Matching Engine. Depending on the keywords you have chosen, this might be a matter of seconds, or it might be hours or days.

If, after clicking the icon, you choose Delete instead, you will see a page with checkboxes representing all of your active subscriptions. Select the ones you want to delete, and click the Delete button below. The selected subscriptions will be cancelled.