The State of Blog Search, 2009
What blog search engine should you use? That depends on your needs.
In order to join a conversation, you've got to be able to find it first. Three years ago "blog search" was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs. These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below.
Choosing a Blog Search Engine
Different circumstances call for different search engines. We've made a chart below illustrating our different recommendations to fill different needs. When, for example, we're looking to see if anyone else has written about a breaking news story yet - we use Google Blogsearch because it's the fastest. When we're putting a live search feed on a public web page, though, we use Technorati and crank up the spam-control it offers. Many businesses use profesional blog tracking services for some of their search needs, but we're not convinced those services are as useful as grabbing some of these worn old tools and doing it yourself.
Where These Services Stand Today
Technorati is the old stand-by, the blog search engine that the smartest blog lovers used to use. These days it's a sad shadow of what it used to be. The company leadership is focused on building an advertising network and search features have been shed like there's no tomorrow. The company's developers say that features will be returning, just in a more accessible form, but we're not holding our breath.
The service is slow, misses a lot of search results (perhaps in the name of spam prevention) and is so loaded down with cruft and extraneous page loads that it makes us want to scream.
That said, the fundamental value proposition of Technorati remains - it counts inbound links to every blog it has indexed and it will let you sort by that metric of "authority." More advanced RSS-heads will appreciate the fact that Technorati delivers "authority" numbers in its RSS feeds and those numbers can be used to fine tune spam filtering in Yahoo Pipes.
Google Blogsearch is the fastest in the industry but has gone almost untouched since the day it launched, except for a recent dabble with memetracking on the front page. Google Blogsearch spam control is not good and recently the search engine started bringing back search results from places like blog sidebars. It thinks that content is new, too, every time a new blog post (the content we really care about) is published. It's painful to look at Google Blogsearch results pages, but if you've got a need for speed or want to make use of the relative heft of the Google search input box for things like complex queries - then it's a good option.
IceRocket is Mark Cuban's baby and has improved more in recent years than anyone else on this list. It's quite a sophisticated tool for searching blogs. It's got trend analysis, author awareness and a number of other cool features. Unfortunately it only lets you organize search results by data and sometimes other needs arise.
IceRocket also misses some search results that even Technorati catches, though it catches some that Technorati misses as well.
Ask.com Blogsearch has become an unexpected favorite of ours over the years. It's nice. Spam control is pretty good, speed is pretty good, the size of the index is pretty good. It's a pretty good blog search engine. The best thing about it is that it's very easy to sort results by relevance, date or "popularity" of the source, as defined by the number of subscribers the source feed has in Ask's formerly market dominant feed reader Bloglines. Want to find out who the biggest blogs are that have written about Chihuahuas lately? (We'll just tell you, it's Jalopnik, Celebrity Baby Blog and Fark.)
If there's a downside here, it's that Ask does index a fair number of feeds that aren't really blogs. And it doesn't do anything else that's particularly fabulous. None the less, we find ourselves going back to it every day.
FriendFeed is a lot of things, but it's also a blog search engine of sorts. It's a cross-network, real time social site originally built by a team of ex-Google employees. It's pretty awesome and once you've got an account there you can search blog posts, Twitter messages, YouTube videos, SlideShare powerpoint presentations and much more. The down side is of course, it only lets you search the content that other users have synced with their FriendFeed account. That content has a whole lot of conversation going on around it though! Several members of the ReadWriteWeb team use the newly launched FriendDeck to do real-time tracking of FriendFeed. You can meet our whole team on FriendFeed here or join us in the RWW room (open to anyone) here.
That's How We See it - What's Blog Search Like for You These Days?
We'd love to hear about your favorite blog search tools these days. What do you use and in what circumstances do you use it? Is blog search itself old news in a new era of real-time microblogging? We welcome other perspectives on this field that may have lost some of its luster but remains useful and important several years after it was so hyped.
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I tend to still rely mainly on Technorati, with a bit of Google BlogSearch mixed in. Google tends to index a lot of garbage, imho, so I turn to it mainly when I want something either very recent, or something obscure that Technorati is having trouble finding.
When I am researching a topic, though, Technorati is gold at finding intelligent, relevant blog posts to bone up on.
Marshall, thanks for including us. We continue to work hard so that users can find great blog content. Always open to suggestions!
Blake Rhodes
IceRocket.com
rhodes@icerocket.com
Ehm...Technorati?? Yes, maybe, only better than Google BlogSearch. :-)
If it's speed and spam filtering you want, try Technorati Search at http://search.technorati.com/
This uses the exact same index we use across the rest of Technorati.com but is search and only search. You can filter results by Language or Technorati Authority.
Searching for terms returns blog posts that mention the term:
http://search.technorati.com/readwriteweb
Searching for reactions or trackbacks is simple, just type in a URL.
http://search.technorati.com/readwriteweb.com
You can even find reactions to blog posts and non-blog content that bloggers have linked to.
Hope this helps folks find what they are looking for faster.
As a contributing editor on BlogHer, I'm frequently searching for well written blog posts on whatever topic I'm writing about. I use Google Blog Search regularly. It works for my purposes, but I get very frustrated by results that are forums and other results that are not actual blogs. Usually you can tell without clicking, thankfully.
It also doesn't seem to be comprehensive or reach very far into the past.
And I wonder that it seems to return heavy on the Blogger blogs, but perhaps the content I'm most often searching for (sex & relationships related) is most often to be found on Blogger blogs.
I would absolutely like a more effective and powerful blog search. I'm going to check out Ice Rocket and Ask.
I also use blog search whenever I'm researching products or restaurants or anything else where I want to see if anyone's said anything interesting about it. I suppose now I could use the various Twitter tools to search for Twitter comments, but I prefer to see if anyone's sat down and really written about something.
Oh, I should add that I also use the Lijit search box on BlogHer as well. That gives me great, targeted results, but I like to go out into the wilds of the Interwebs and see what shakes out there, too. :)
I find all of these tools perfectly acceptable for known-item blog search, when I have a very specific information need. But none of them help me explore the blogosphere. There's a great need for such a tool, and I'd love to see someone step up and build it.
More of my thoughts on the subject:
http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/09/14/is-blog-search-different/
How did Feedster and Technorati bungle blog search so badly? Blog search seems like a *VERY* straightforward service to provide.
blog search not like google search, for me, rss is enough we searching result is not so good.
Hi and thanks for a great blog post.
There's definitely money to be made in blog search. Twingly is approaching break-even quite soon, we'll be profitable some time during 2009.
We believe there's a need for vertical search in conversational media like blogs, microblogs etc and that there's a lot to improve. Like you mentioned above, when Google Blog Search was launched the former players like Technorati were getting away from their core search products. Therefore, innovation in blog search have been suffered after Google launched an "enough good" blog search and after that not developing it.
Twingly is trying to accelerate innovation in blog search again. We are growing pretty fast.
/Anton, Twingly.com
Technorati as you mentioned is going from bad to worse these days.
Icerocket may soon take its authority over Technorati in terms of search capability..
Nice to know, i have used all except icerocket. Want to check it out.. But aren't Google Blog Search and Technorati sufficient?
Twingly is fast-becoming an essential tool for blog search. Blogpulse is good for stuff on LiveJournal that no one else picks up - but is usually a day or so behind so not much cop for breaking news.
Technorati compared to Ask.com Don't you think Ask.com is getting more audience recently?
We're trying to add to the blog search ecology, by building out hand-selected niches where we find the best blogs in a category and make them searchable as a group updated every hour.
You can access any of our niches at www.blognetnews.com/search or through any of our section fronts, for instance: www.blognetnews.com/virginia for Virginia's news and politics blogs.
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