One of the great things about topikality is how it learns what articles you like and delivers them to you each day. This saves us all a lot of time staying up-to-date with the topiks that are important to us.

To make use of this great feature you need to train topikality on what articles you find relevant and the ones that are of no interest. We’ve assembled a few tips that should make this process faster for you.

1. Use the up arrow and cross regularly
The arrow and cross appears next to every article summary and along the topikality voting bar. The more you use these to signify what articles you like and dislike the more topikality will learn what articles you find relevant.

The system needs a good sample of articles you like and dislike. At least 50 of each and more for general topiks. So keep using the up arrow and cross until you are happy with your stream of articles. The more you use them the more precise your feed of articles will be. When to stop is totally up to you.

2. Similar documents
When you find an article you like, and click the up arrow, topikality automatically tries to find three more similar articles that have recently been published.
Here’s how youcan use similar documents:

• Go to the topik Articles page
• Find an article you like
• Click the up arrow and wait a second
• If available, topikality will display up to three more articles that are similar and recent
• Click the up arrow on these articles if you like them and the cross if you don’t. topikality will quickly learn you like this type of information and find more relevant articles for you.

3. Black listed words
This is a great feature to quickly eliminate articles you never want to read. Here’s how it works:

• Go to the topik Articles page
• Find a word that commonly appears in articles you don’t want to read
• Go to the Edit topik page by clicking the little pencil edit icon
• Type the word into the third box ‘But don’t find articles with any of these unwanted words…’
• Click save topik

From this point forward any article with the unwanted word will not appear in your topik. Please note that articles already in your topik will not be deleted. You can simply ignore these articles or manually delete them using the above technique.

A good example of when I use this approach is my topik on the English Premier League (EPL). Often articles on the EPL refer to other sports and I don’t want to read these artices. So I use the above blacklisted words approach to eliminate sports like cricket, rugby, golf, etc.

4. Using search to train a topik quickly
This is one of the fastest ways to train a topik and a technique I regularly use.

• Go to the topik Articles page
• Find a word that commonly appears the articles you want to read
• Type this word into the search box at the top right hand corner of the screen and click Enter
• All the articles containing the word will appear on the screen
• Click the up arrow on all the articles you like
• Click the down arrow on all the articles that are not relevant
• The more articles you click the faster topikality will learn.

You can also use this approach to quickly find all the articles you don’t want to read, click the cross next to each article and train topikality to exclude this type of article in future.

5. Blacklisted domains
Sometimes you may see articles from certain web sites or blogs that are of no interest to you. Maybe you don’t agree with their views or the quality of their articles is not good enough. You can exclude all articles from these sources using the Blacklisted Domains feature. Here’s how it works:

• Go to your topik Articles page
• Find a web site or blog that you want to exclude
• Click the x next to the web address
• You should notice the web address now has a strikethrough
• In future updates there will be no articles from this web site or blog. Please be aware previous articles will remain in the topik.

I hope these tips make the training process a little fast for you. You may have a few more tips. Share them with everyone in the comments section below.

Len Chanoff conducted a comprehensive video tutorial on how he uses topikality. You can watch the video by clicking here.