TC50: Does the world need another news aggregator? Thoora thinks it does

A startup called Thoora wants to become the site where readers find every article and comment around the news stories that interest them, in real time.

The obvious competitor to the company, which just launched a limited beta test at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, is Google, with its News and Blog Search sites. Thoora wants to differentiate itself by bringing together professional news articles, blogs posts, comments, and posts on Twitter.

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Comments and posts aren’t indexed by either Google News or Google Blog Search, and Google separates news articles and amateur blog posts into two different search sites. Thoora also says it has ranking and clustering technology to help users see which story is attracting the most interest, no matter where it was published.

“We index, in real-time, every tweet, every blog post,” says chief executive Mike Lee.

A lot of the expert panelists seemed skeptical about whether Thoora will be able to differentiate itself, a concern that I share. Even with the best technology, it’s hard to see how Thoora will communicate that superiority to users who already have so many news aggregators to choose from.