Current search portals for political monitoring are outdated. (By political monitoring, we mean people/orgs monitoring government announcements, policy updates, etc.; not the government monitoring people.) Each one only covers one region of the world, and they only allow you to search government publications based on simple keyword searches. Government affairs professionals often spend hours combing through noisy search results to find relevant developments. For example, they might search for the words “labor”, “employment”, “workforce”, etc., combing through all US government publications mentioning these keywords to find relevant material. Then they might have to repeat this process on separate platforms for the UK, EU, etc.
Parsagon allows you to search for exactly what you want. Instead of searching for all publications containing the phrase "crop production", you can search for something as precise as "news related to US crop production, including foreign crop production that impacts the US" and get the publications you’re looking for from any region of the world (our demo lets you search the US and UK).
So you might be wondering: why are we launching on Hacker News now? After all, we’re YC W21, and we’ve been around a while. Well for the first 2-3 years of our existence, we were working on an AI developer tool that generates data pipelines, and while we had plenty of people interested in using our AI, our AI couldn’t solve most of the use cases we encountered (at least, it couldn’t solve them well). Everyone’s use cases were quite disparate, and we wasted a lot of time trying to get our product to the point where we could solve all of them (and during that time, we just weren’t concerned with launching on HN).
We had little success until a large non-profit reached out for help getting started with our product. They wanted to scrape a wide variety of government organizations to get announcements and communications that could affect their line of work. This request seemed odd to us, since there are already platforms that track government activity seemingly ready-made for their use case. Why would these mostly non-technical government affairs professionals be trying to learn to use a developer tool?
As we talked with these first customers and learned how outdated current political monitoring tools are, this use case became increasingly exciting to us for a few reasons. First, we felt our AI gave us a significant advantage in this space, allowing us to monitor government websites on a scale that existing tools couldn’t match. While most existing products focused on monitoring a single country, we could build pipelines to get most of what our users wanted from any given country in under a week, and give them better ways to search and aggregate that data at the same time.
Second, two other significant organizations reached out around the same time with similar use cases. We were excited that larger organizations were interested in this use case and were willing/able to pay significant sums for it (one problem we had before was that many companies interested in using Parsagon were small startups with low willingness/ability to pay). And since these organizations were able to introduce us to others in their industry, it quickly became apparent that we should focus on solving this one use case of political monitoring.
And so now we’re here! We have a product we’re excited about, that our current customers are excited about, and we want to share it with HN! We’d really appreciate any feedback, and if you know anyone working in government affairs, we’d appreciate it if you showed this to them!
I know it is truly the peak of the spirit of Hacker News to make the first comment a nitpick, but the fact that your name is a play on Pentagon but your logo is a hexagon causes me irrational levels of emotional distress.
Also would be great to show the source in the list without having to click "source" :)
I’m curious if private ngos or companies can use it as well? Can we track policy and potential impacts on industry? Etc?
As a smoke test, I tried the following queries, and they returned the same result. Good job!
international relations Turkey
international relations about the country with the capital city of Ankara
I definitely think we're going to see a lot more people building in this space. There seems to be a growing consensus among the government affairs people I've talked to that it's just a matter of time
Give me keywords to search for based on this sentence "international relations about the country with the capital city of Ankara"
You get the following:
- Turkey international relations - Ankara diplomacy - Turkey foreign policy - Turkey global partnerships - Turkey international politics - Turkey geopolitical strategy - Turkey foreign affairs - Turkey global relations - Turkey NATO relations (if relevant to your topic) - Ankara as a diplomatic hub
So it is not unsurprising that the same link was returned
For political monitoring in particular, I think this is pretty important. Different organizations in different industries will inevitably have very specific/obscure sources they want to track, so rather than promising that we already have everything they'd be checking, we just assure them that we can add anything missing really quickly.
Could your software be used to create something like a specialized feed? For example like the newscatcher feed product (if you are familiar with them)
If you have any questions or need anything, please reach out at https://parsagon.io/contact ! Working with non-profits has been some of the most fun work we've done, so we'd love to do what we can to make the platform work for you!
Not saying it's not useful, just fascinated at what excuses have gone in endless meetings for 3 years to do whats basically an afternoons worth of work.
Yes I mean that literally. You start off an aws rag app or a huggingface container, you download the CSVs fom cbp public portal, and you add a sh*tty backgroundcolor and a border glow that doesn't go all the way around a button. 10-15 more years of this and maybe we'll get the next dropbox again who knows.
Achieving accuracy with RAG and LLMs is a challenging task that requires balancing precision and recall. For instance, when you type "Ankara" into GPT-4o, it provides information about Turkey. However, searching "Ankara" in their product does not yield articles related to Turkey.
I get some interesting articles, but only really one was relevant
even then it was only tangential.
Its kinda useful as a news cutting service, but its really not precise enough to replace a decent PR summary report.
for housing policy It either over indexes on hansard (good source, but not for policy) or the daily mail (would have been a good source for conservative policy, but not labour.)
What am I doing wrong?
I happen to have built something in the same vein in a few months earlier this summer for the Gemini API developer competition.
For anyone interested, check out Gov Notes (https://app.gov-notes.com)
The site lets you dig into US house committee hearing videos posted to YouTube using AI search and chat. Even have some fairly powerful grounding in the chat - you can ask followups like "when was that discussed in the video?" and the chat will reply with a clickable link to a specific timestamp in the video where your current topic was discussed.
The challenge is domain knowledge and not tech in my opinion. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies providing RAG and LLM, but the challenge is, like you pointed out, what should you do if you encounter something like "Ankara".
For BestBuy, this might not mean much, unless there is a BestBuy in Turkey. For a government related site, cities and geography is important, so trying to extract additional meaning from Ankara is probably important.
The other sounds more like what you are looking for. It returns a more focused set of results and actually generates PR summary reports as PDFs for our customers.
However, we can't really give a public demo to HN of this second one, because it takes 1-3 minutes per run and is quite computationally intensive. (And we were told that our HN launch should demo something the community can easily play around with).
That being said, if you want an example of the output of this second search tool, you can see it here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sandy-suh-2ba05bb0_parsagons-...
In short, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I think you're looking for a more precise version of our product that we weren't able to provide a demo for