Last Monday night around 7 p.m. we quietly launched a brand-new new site at Outside.in.

The new version of our site will help you you find out what’s happening wherever you are. Read on for the details of how you can use the new Outside.in to find the most relevant hyperlocal content quickly and easily—and for some information on what’s coming up next.

Search by Address, Neighborhood, City, or Place Name

Our homepage now features a single search box that can tell you what’s happening wherever you are (in the U.S. of course!). This shiny new search engine intelligently combines a few types of searches we’ve offered for awhile (address, neighborhood, ZIP, and city search) and adds a new one (place search). Now we evaluate your query to determine what you’re searching for and show you different results based on your input.

You can search from the homepage for:

• Address: Enter your exact address to get news stories and blog posts within 1,000 feet of you. For instance, searching for “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC” will show you what’s going on within 1,000 feet of the White House. This is the technology we formerly called “Radar,” but it’s now been integrated into our core experience so you can get radar results (now known as “Nearby News”) without going to a different section of our site.
• Neighborhood, city, state, ZIP: You can also search for your neighborhood, city, state, or ZIP code to find all the news we’ve collected in the areas that matter to you. Check out examples of our news in Chinatown, Boston; Portland, OR; 90210; and all of Texas. Don’t mess with the biggest page on our site!
• Place: The homepage search box can also get you to news about your favorite places, such as your alma mater (mine is Georgetown University), the park down the street from your office (ours is Brooklyn Bridge Park), or that book store that your West Coast friends claim is better than The Strand (Powell’s Books).

You can also search for regions, addresses, or places in the bottom search box of any internal page. You’ll notice that we’ve pre-filled that field with the name of the region you’re currently viewing (or the region that contains the place or address you’re currently viewing) but you can overwrite that default with the city, neigbhorhood, ZIP code, address, or place you want to search for next.

Keyword Search in Your Neighborhood

Since I just mentioned that you should be doing your neighborhood, address, and place searches from the bottom box on internal pages, you may be wondering what you’re supposed to do with the top box. That’s for something totally new: keyword search within your neighborhood or city, at a place, or at any address!

We’ve always brought you news and stories at the most granular geographic level, now you can refine your search even further by searching for topics that interest you. Here are some examples:

• Enter “art” in the top search box and “Little Tokyo, Los Angeles” in the bottom box to find news about art in Little Tokyo.
• Type “events” in the top search box and “Museum of Modern Art” in the bottom search box to read about recent and upcoming events at MoMA.
• Put “food” in the top search box and “300 Bartlett St., San Francisco, CA” to find out where to eat after hanging out at the Mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Streamlined Site Design

We’ve also simplified the user experience on Outside.in significantly. Our new design is stripped of clutter and provides much clearer, more legible fonts—especially for page headers and news headlines. Compare the before and after of our Austin, TX page:

Austin Before

Austin After

This is just the first of many iterations of our new site design. We’ll be tracking the success of these new templates with a variety of engagement metrics to see what helps our users (that’s you!) find the most interesting content and content publishers (bloggers and news sites) get the most traffic. We aim to help you find a ton of content you care about, so you’ll see us testing lots of different templates and features.

RSS Feeds Galore

My favorite offering on our new site is the RSS feeds we’re generating for every page so you can take our news with you. We’ve always published feeds for city, neighborhood, ZIP, and topic pages, but now you can subscribe to news within 1,000 feet of any address; news about any place; or topic searches for your favorite region, address, or place.

You can find the RSS feeds in the toolbar of your browser, linked from the footer of any page, or by adding “.rss” to the end of any URL.

Just add the feed URL to your favorite feed reader (such as Google Reader, Bloglines, or News Gator), and you’ll automatically see new stories as we find them.

Proximity Matters

One of the most interesting challenges in hyperlocal is the mind-boggling number of regions and places with the same name. We’ve taken a first crack at tackling this issue on our new site, and are hoping for your feedback in improving our efforts.

If your input to our homepage search box matches more than one region or place in the U.S., we’ll send you to the one closest to the city we detected from your IP address (don’t worry, we’re keeping your location top-secret at OI World HQ!) and show suggested links to other regions and places with the same name. For instance, looking for “St. Petersburg” from a New York IP address will take you to our region page for St. Petersburg, PA, but if you’re coming at us from an IP in Georgia we’ll take you to my hometown, St. Petersburg, FL, instead.

Either way, we’ll show you links underneath the page header that you can use to easily get to other matches if we didn’t guess the one you were looking for.

The same goes for places! Searching for “Starbucks” from my Brooklyn IP address brings me to our news about the Starbucks in Park Slope, but if you did the same search from Seattle, we’d take you to a Starbucks in Broadway/Capitol Hill instead.

Naturally, giving us more information in the search box (specifying “St. Petersburg, FL” or “Starbucks, Broadway”) will take you directly to the region or place you had in mind.

Stronger, Faster Technology

Our CTO Andy Parsons will be posting later today on the new platform that’s powering all this goodness.

[update: Read all about our new infrastructure!]

What’s Next

Upcoming features to the site will be focused on providing you with the most targeted, personalized local information available. We want to vanquish information overload by helping you find only the most relevant content—and find it quickly. Ideas we’re brewing include ways to filter and sort our content and get alerts for the stories that matter most.

Feedback? Questions? Suggestions? We want to hear from you. Drop your thoughts in the comments or send us an email at contact@outside.in.