The Sorry State of Blog Search Engines

Maybe there's no money it. Maybe there's no love to be gained from it from bloggers. But blog search is in a pitiful state right now. There's room for someone to come along and innovate.

Now you can argue that blog search doesn't matter as much these days. Twitter and Friendfeed both have strong search capes. The main Google engine scoops up blogs as fast as Elvis ate peanut butter and banana sandwiches. In addition, paid tools like Radian6 do a very nice job. But, darn it, I grew accustomed to having good blog search FOR FREE. And now it appears to be gone.

Here's a rundown of the contenders and what's currently right/wrong with each. Also, I put each site through its paces by tracking links to my recent post on WIkipedia Mobile.

Technorati - Link searches pull up both blog rolls and mentions. Please give me a choice. Technorati seems to be more focused on rolling up bloggers into ad networks rather than on core search. They are leading right now in results, however. (Links to my post: 18. RSS feeds? Busted)

Google Blog Search - For awhile, Google gave me everything I wanted. Fast results on both keywords and link searches. But then a few weeks ago the plumbing broke. Now it's practically useless because it alerts me anytime a blogger who has me on their blogroll updates his/her site. (Links to my post: 9)

Twingly - They offer spam free results. And they look promising so far. But when you put Twingly through its paces, it is very weak on results. (Links to my post: 4)

Sphere - No longer a blog search engine. Off my list.

IceRocket - This might be the true dark horse. It's slowly been improving and it's got a spiffy new design. Note how each link shows you other posts that are referencing it. Smart. Mark Cuban may have a hit here after all. However, IceRocket Trends is currently down. (Links to my post: 14)

BlogPulse: I stopped using this site circa 2006. It has some nice features, but it's not working for me now. (Links to my post: 5)

Ask.com: I always forget about these guys. Their blog search engine is pretty good. Unfortunately, they include my own site in the search results. (Links to my post: 9. Bloglines, owned by Ask, turns up the same)

Bloggers, what are you using? Leave your thoughts in the comments. Are there any I missed? I am giving IceRocket a serious look again because they seem to be catching up.

Comments

[Steve Dodd]

Hi Richard, RSS feeds are available through our commercial service www.sysomos.com. They include all content from blogs, microblogging, forums, message boards, online news and wikis. Let me know through the "contact us" on our web site if you'd like to see a full demonstration.Thanks.sdodd@sysomos.com

[Carmen Holotescu]

Hi,

Good evaluation, and comments so far.

Two more search engines for blogs are http://www.urlfan.com and http://www.yacktrack.com.

Carmen

[Rax]

Some great insights here. I have to say that I triangulate using a combination of Techorati, Google Blog search and IceRocket. Of the three, I'm a big fan of IceRocket due to it's trend mapping features - although they haven't always been too stable.

Technorati on the other hand has dissolved into a confused mess. It seems that the site is more interested in pulling searchers into some kind of blogging network where the focus is on rating, tagging and favouriting (I've just created a verb!) rather than on the search itself. The navigation can be somewhat daunting and you have to be extremely familiar with Technorati in order to summize any kind of meaningful results.

Google Blog search wins on the simplicity front but it is still fairly basic even with the advanced search feature. That said, for a quick in-out search, it is very good. Or should I say was. Recently, as many of you have already mentioned, I've been seing multiple indexes or indeed blogs from more than a year ago being reindexed. What's going on?

What I want is some kind of proximity search which somehow allows me to search for blogs written in a particular region. Not sure how this would work exactly, but I'm assuming that there would have to be some kind of voluntary location broadcast when registering your blog with a particular engine. I love Twitter's search features but then again, Twitter is but one standardised platform. When indexing blogs, you're having to deal with a multitude of different platforms each with its own registration details. Domains for blogs are more often than not confined to the top level domain that has been assigned by the blogging platform (e.g. xxx.blogspot.com, or .typepad.com). This doesn't give us any real clue as to locality.

I guess blogs do trancend boundaries, but every now and again I'd like to host a blogger event for one of my clients based on a community living in London or Birmingham or Manchester. It just takes a bit of time finding the right people. So won't somebody please take that pain away?

[willy]

yahoo! boss: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/