While many different Google projects push the envelope with features and interface innovation - users are excited just to see Blog Search make catch-up moves, since it's a sign that the product is still breathing at all. No news about much needed spam control, no response to Twitter stealing many blogs' thunder, no personalization, no visualization, no semantics, no mobile play - nothing. It's really disappointing. Google Blog Search remains the best option if you're looking for fast results, but other options are better if you have any needs other than speed.

Google Blog Search is the fastest in the industry but has gone almost untouched since the day it launched, except for a recent dabble with meme-tracking on the front page. Google Blog Search spam control is not good and recently the search engine started bringing back search results from places like blog sidebars. [Update: that appears to have been fixed now.] 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 Blog Search 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.

Day in and day out, I use Ask.com's blog search instead. It's nothing earth-shattering, but there's a whole lot less spam.

Is blogging such old news that only Twitter search is interesting to innovators anymore? When it comes to more thought-out, long-form, researched, discussed news and opinion, blogs still matter. We wish Google felt the same way. The web is a really exciting place these days - why isn't Google Blog Search?

Tag Cloud and Top Stories

Iterend indexes about 250,000 blogs. Once you log in, you are greeted by a very large tag cloud on the left side of the screen and a list of the top stories of the past 24 hours on the right. It is not quite clear how Iterend determines this list, but it simply seems to look at how often a story was linked to. Currently, this list is dominated by political stories.

The tag cloud is a bit overwhelming at first. To see all of it, you have to scroll down and it includes over 250 keywords.

Search

The search engine itself relies heavily on tag clouds as well. For every search, Iterend displays two tag clouds that allow you to drill down deeper into your search: one for related phrases and one for related categories.

If you search for "McCain," for example, Iterend will suggest searching for "Obama" or "Sarah Palin." This actually works quite well and allows you to filter your searches quickly and effortlessly. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for every search.

Verdict

Iterend has a lot of potential. However, the company needs to make sure that its index is more up to date. Today, most blog search engines index a post within minutes after it is posted, so having a 20 hour delay simply takes away any reason to even start using this service - unless you are looking for old news.

Invites

Iterend gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Just follow this link and give it a try.

Blogsearch in general is rife with spam and Technorati is at a real disadvantage compared to other blogsearch engines, but that's not the company's only problem. What would you like to see Technorati do in order to be relevant again? Below is our wish list.

The number one problem with Technorati is definitely spam blogs showing up in search results. Ask.com's blog search does a decent job of limiting spam by priortizing search results from feeds with a number of subscribers in the company's popular feed reader Bloglines. We could write a whole other post about what we wish Ask's blogsearch would do to improve too, though.

Google Blogsearch could take a similar step for spam control by referencing subscriptions in Google Reader. It may already have done so, but there's little evidence of active developement in Google Blogsearch.

When using Technorati, we've taken to running search feed through Yahoo Pipes and filtering out items with relatively low inbound links or from sources with a lot of spam on a given topic. That's not a lot of fun to have to do, but we sure appreciate those numbers being made available in the company's feeds.

Technorati has issued some new guidelines for being included in less spammy search results, but we'll see how well they work over the coming weeks and months. Some of the guidelines seem fairly arbitrary, like publishing a full instead of an excerpted feed and pinging Technorati directly instead of through a 3rd party. We assume that pings from Feedburner will still be welcome.

Uptime

Technorati returns a "we're sorry, there was an error - try again later" message far more than the other blog search engines do. The first several times we tried searching for inbound links to the new spam control announcement today we got that message.

Return sort by authority to blog directory and elsewhere

There was a time when Technorati's Blog Directory was a pretty good place to discover top blogs on any topic. It displayed blogs that had been tagged by authors as relevant to certain topics and let you sort the list by most inbound links in the last 6 months. Inexplicably, the sort by authority option was removed months ago and the blog directory is now under emphasized in favor of various bizarre options for browsing blogs topically. It's now relatively unusable.

If I'm interested in discovering the top blogs about cooking, for example, it sure would be nice if I could navigate directly to http://technorati.com/blogs/tag/cooking and find them in some intelligable order.

Pageview churn

Possibly the most annoying thing about Technorati these days is that search results aren't easy to navigate. From the front page of the site you're taken to full text search results but the headlines on the page don't link to the posts, they link to a Technorati page about the posts. The actual post links are small and grey below the headlines. That's absolutely contemptable.

From other pages, searches will bring you to other search results. The whole thing is ridiculous.

We'll leave complaints about poor, messy site design alone for now - the service has enough other problems. The company is moving its emphasis over to providing an ad network and letting its basic functionality fall by the wayside. Investors have been complaining for some time about Technorati's performance and we're all suffering as a result. Are there not enough ad networks in the world already? Technorati should make its own traffic grow by serving its users better and monetize that. The company tried a number of functional partnerships with other publishers, like the Washington Post for example, but apparently couldn't figure out how to make money from that. That's a shame.

Come on Technorati - we're honestly cheering for you! There's a huge need out there and you could be filling it.

What would readers like to see Technorati do in order to become relevant again? Leave your thoughts in comments, the company is sure to read them and maybe something positive will happen.

Vote in our poll below and let us know your thoughts about Technorati's relevance in the comments below.

Enter in two or more keywords, like "Clinton vs. Obama vs. McCain," and the graph will display a comparison of those terms using a different colored line for each. A pie chart will also display showing the percentages of mentions for each term throughout the blogosphere.

Tracking the Political Candidates

Beneath the charts are the blog search results for the items, with each term as a separate tab. The graphs themselves are interactive, too - you can click anywhere on the chart's lines to see the articles from that particular date.

Trendpedia also offers advanced search tools from a separate page that let you perform searches using the word "AND"  to search for multiple terms in one search to compare to multiple terms in a separate search. (Example: "twitter and jaiku" vs. "wordpress and typepad and blogger") You can also make your own label for the searches which will appear on the chart that displays. (Ex: "microblogging" vs. "blogging"). The advanced search page also lets you specify which language to cull the search results from, if desired.

Blogging vs Microblogging

After performing the search, you can use the provided social media buttons to share the trend on del.icio.us, reddit, Digg, Facebook, StumpleUpon, or via email. However, a glaring omission is absence of an embed code for pasting the chart onto your blog or web site, forcing you to do screen grabs instead.

Trendpedia is clearly meant to be a competitor to Nielsen Media's Blogpulse, a site which Peter Kim points out appears to be on "auto-pilot." The Blogpulse homepage still features a section called "2005 Year in Review" and the latest news section's last update is from April 2007. Trendpedia's homepage, on the other hand, shows featured trends, popular trends last month, and popular trends last week. So, perhaps now with Tredpedia's offering, we'll start seeing some movement and innovation in this space once again.

Trendpedia homepage

Blogdigger started at around the same time as ReadWriteWeb (we began publishing April 2003) and it was one of the first RSS-based blog search engines. I first corresponded with Greg Gershman around the time we started our respective endeavours. Over the past 5 years Blogdigger has been one of the less high profile blog search companies around - but even so we've often compared it to Technorati and Feedster. In 2005, Blogdigger diversified from blog content to focus more on digital media. At that time it launched a media search product, to extract and index media content from blog content - including audio, video, and images. Blogdigger has also experimented with Groups and Local apps.

This acquisition by Odeo is probably as much about hiring the talent of Gershman than it is about Blogdigger. The acquisition figure isn't being divulged. However Gershman was pretty frank about Blogdigger's fortunes over the past 5 years, admitting that their better funded competition (notably Technorati) have dominated the blog search sector. This sector has also had its high profile failures, it should be noted - Feedster and PubSub among them.

How Blogdigger Has Fared Over 5 Years

I admire the way Blogdigger has diversified through the years and consistently sought out new niches within blog search. The digital media part of its business is what, in the end, differentiated Blogdigger from the crowd. It's worth reading Greg's story in full, below, as it provides an informative glimpse into how a small, unfunded startup has battled through 5 years and finally had a successful conclusion (well, we hope the price paid can be deemed a success). And remember that Blogdigger, like this blog, launched well before the web 2.0 hype began. Here's Greg's story:

"Regarding Blogdigger: as the blog search space grew more crowded, we tried a few different approaches to keep Blogdigger relevant. One was to expand into various other blog search applications, such as media search and local search. Media search really had the most traction, due to some of the search partnerships we had with sites like Webjay and Ourmedia. At our peak we were serving over 100,000 pages a day (not including RSS feeds; our RSS searches have continued to grow over the years, we now service about 400K searches a day). Since those partnerships went away, we've lost a good portion of our traffic, but, strangely, our revenues are about the same, only slightly lower (not in proportion to our traffic decrease). We still have a good number of users (our stats are on Quantcast), and some good partnerships, including powering the search for Jurist, a blog project run out of the University of Pittsburgh's Law School.

We've also licensed to market intelligence and monitoring services, and are hoping to continue to grow this in the future. Due to various factors (some of which were that we never raised any outside funding for the site, also as a differentiator) we moved away from trying to index all the blogs on the web, to making sure that our index was as spam-free and duplicate-free as possible. The goal is that when you look for information, you get good results each time. This has proved beneficial in attracting partners to syndicate our results on their sites, which in turn has helped us build traffic to Blogdigger."

Congratulations Greg and team. And we look forward to the new Odeo, which we will be checking out soon.

Semantic analysis of content makes topic focused search smarter than otherwise possible, and wrapping it in other value adds like blog and job search is a smart, solid play.

The news section of each hub displays recent stories vetted by topical relevance via an industry specific ontology, combined with relative weighting of top sources according to how often they write about a particular sector (again determined by industry specific ontology). Its an interesting approach to news, a combination I don't think I've seen before.

A news feed made up of all the hubs you select is then displayed on your Orglex page and is exportable in feed format. The company has a white-label version of its Venture News feed available on the leading blog VentureBeat, though this automated aggregation of links off-site doesn't get very prominent billing there. No surprise and no knock on either company for that.

The feeds published by several of the hubs look like something worth subscribing to already. The most recent items in the "social networking" feed are on the left, judge for yourself.

In addition to news, Orglex also aggregates industry specific job listings from sites around the web and pages for people in each industry. The people section of the site seems inoperable right now and for a job aggregation site to try and to wring cache out of big brand icons as "featured employers" seems questionable.

One of the most interesting parts of the site is the leader board set up for each hub. Top sources are presumably indexed manually but ranked by the frequency with which they write about that hub's topic, according to the ontology. I'm always looking for new ways to discover top sources in new niches and Orglex could be a good tool to put in that toolbox.

The whole site is a work in progress and that's probably why Orglex hasn't gotten any media coverage to date except for the Amazon Web Services blog post I discovered it through. None the less, it's an interesting service to watch.

Readers interested in semantic web developments should check out the resources we've compiled on that and four other emerging key topics in the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008.

There is no sign of life on the site and the Feedster blog has already been killed off (the big 404 in the sky).

In terms of the blog search market in general, Feedster has been struggling for 3+ years now - this RWW post in July 2005 shows how Feedster was falling behind Technorati even then. Now Feedster seems to be, if not in the DeadPool, then at least in the PurgatoryPool. PubSub was another victim in this market.

Nowadays, the blog search market seems to be made up of 3 main players - Google Blog Search, Technorati and Bloglines/Ask.com - and a lot of smaller players such as Zuula and Blogdigger. Personally I still use Technorati a few times a week, and the search function of Google Reader. I also am a heavy user of Google's main search, which I find brings up good blog results (i.e. often I don't see the need for a specialist blog search engine). I did a quick poll of the other RWW writers. Josh said he still uses Technorati sometimes, but also Google Blog search. Marshall said that he uses Ask.com for minimizing spam, relies heavily on feeds with subscribers in Bloglines, and uses Technorati too. He finds that Google Blog Search is good for speed.

What blog search engine do you use - and why?