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Blog Search
Jason Calacanis begged Yahoo! and Google to enter the blog search market in a widely read post on his blog last week.
The comments indicate some frustration with Technorati and rightly so.
I get about 10 trackbacks a day from blog posts that link to me. About 20% of them get picked up on Technorati. It's gotten to the point that I don't bother to check who is linking to me with Technorati anymore. I used to do that query at least once a day and on many days I'd do it more often than that. It's just too frustrating to use a service that doesn't work right.
So the next thing that happened is that Steve Rubel found a beta version of Yahoo!'s RSS/blog search service and of course blogged it. Apparently Yahoo! took it down but the news is out there. Yahoo! is going to do blog search and probably soon.
I suppose Google won't be too far behind. This was always a natural move for them to make.
Business Week's excellent blog called Blogspotting picked up on all of this.
But the question is do they roll this out as a separate service or do they just offer the ability to limit the search to blogs when you do a regular search? I frankly would prefer the latter and I think they would too. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
In his comments to Jason's post, David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati explains that they are having a difficult time keeping up with the amazing growth of blogging right now. He says:
I'm sorry that Technorati has been having problems lately - we've been dealing with the scaling issues that come from the incredible growth of the blogosphere. Here's some numbers for you:
We're now tracking an average of 850,000 posts every day, up from 500,000 just 3 months ago. On the day of the bombings, we saw over 1.1 Million posts. We're also seeing over 25,000 pings from spammers each day above and beyond this - spam blogs that we pull from the index.
We're also seeing massive pageview growth as well - over 40% growth month on month for the past 3 months, and things show no sign of letup.
I give David credit for admitting the issues, but they may have bitten off more than they can chew at Technorati. My question is whether Google or Yahoo! can get this right. There are a ton of links that are getting created every day. Can any web service track all of them? Is it possible?
The fact is the web is scaling at an incredible rate these days. The idea that anyone can build a service to keep track of it in real time is a question mark for me.
Which is why I am using tag search more often these days. Technorati offers tag search but they bundle it with their blog search and generate a "consolidated" results page that can be very good, but often times is not.
Delicious doesn't offer a search service per se, but you can search the tags with some interesting results. I think this may be a future direction for more relevancy and immediacy in search and blog search in particular.
So I'll leave you all with three links to look at. Let me know which one you'd prefer for a search on Pink Floyd.
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» ON SENDING YAHOO!/GOOGLE AN SOS ON BLOGSEARCH from *michael parekh on IT*
SOS: SAVE OUR SEARCH There's a little kerfuffle in the blog-world about whether and/or when Yahoo! and Google should jump in with both feet in the nascent, chaotic, and red-hot growing market for blog search. It got kicked off by web-lord Jason Calcani... [Read More]
Tracked on Jul 10, 2005 7:22:45 PM
» Blog Search from del.icio.us WebCites
The comments indicate some frustration with Technorati and rightly so.... [Read More]
Tracked on Jul 18, 2005 5:58:24 PM
Posted July 10, 2005 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
I posted a comment to Rubel's blog - not published, I guess - pointing out the the advanced search function in Yahoo!'s MyWeb 2.0 beta has an advanced search that allows one to search RSS/XML files only.
Posted by: Greg | Jul 10, 2005 3:33:57 PM
Excellent post Fred…
Recently, for very targeted search, I’ve been using del.icio.us. By searching del.icio.us tags, I am more likely to find articles, websites, and blog entries that are directly targeted toward my interests. Del.icio.us users think like me. The service is still small enough that it’s users comprise a like minded community. Though Google is great for really broad searches and questions, it lacks the human element that makes del.icio.us so powerful and incredibly useful.
What del.icio.us needs to do to facilitate really effective search is create relationships between similar tags in its search. Their search is too literal and would be more powerful if it included related tags. Though del.icio.us does include a list of related tags on the search result page, these tend to encourage "discovery browsing," which is not conducive for directed and targeted search.
- H
Posted by: hbrooks | Jul 10, 2005 3:44:17 PM
I've been using the blog search function at Icerocket. I've got a set of RSS feeds from that for things like our compnay name, product and so on. Seems to work 'ok'.
Posted by: Brian | Jul 10, 2005 4:15:51 PM
Good post Fred...interesting that Jason didn't include microsoft in his petition...changing times...
Posted by: Michael Parekh | Jul 10, 2005 7:59:06 PM
Dave Sifry at Technorati is a good advertisement for "eating your own dog food". I have noticed that whenever someone, particularly influential, comments about problems with Technorati Dave is right there with an answer and explanation. Talk about direct customer communication!
It also shows the value of Technorati I guess as he is obviously scouring the blogsphere for his and Technoratis name when it appears. On the negative side it does highlight a continuing string of problems that I am sure any other business would face but Dave makes very public. Is this a good thing to do? I am undecided.
Blog tracking faces "real time" issues that the search engines dont. Information has a "half life" and blog information has a very rapid decay which means "real time" is a requirement (or at least within a few hours). This is a tough problem. Perhaps now is the time for him to sell?
Posted by: Ian Wilson | Jul 10, 2005 8:27:26 PM
Delicious search wins by me. Not only can I get good results, but I can see how many other people think the results are valuable and, ideally, see input from people I trust. Sure, it's rudimentary right now, but I can see it getting very, very cool.
I've never liked Technoratie. Initially, it was difficult to understand, slow and never really provided me with anything good to click on. Lately, it looks better, seems a bit more clear what it's trying to do. However, it just can't really do what it's trying to do.
Posted by: scott partee | Jul 11, 2005 12:42:07 AM
Finally got to reading this...
Fred, you make a great case with links to search results. I would choose the del.icio.us results myself. In a comment above HBrooks said "Del.icio.us users think like me." I can't agree more! I love the results I get from tag searches with Del.icio.us. They're so... RELEVANT!
I do admit I am a bit worried about tag spam, but I haven't seen any major issues with that yet.
Posted by: Sweaty | Jul 13, 2005 1:41:08 PM
Technorati gave me the best content: an image of the band reunited at Live 8 under an "Anything is Possible" banner. If you rate the user experience as being contingent on emotional meaning, that's the winner.
Posted by: Ned | Jul 14, 2005 10:52:47 AM
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