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.