Mark Evans

Frustrations With Blog Search (and Technorati)

As much as I like the concept of Technorati, I'm growing increasingly frustrated with how it works. One of my biggest issues is the quality of the search results. Many of them produce mediocre results, rather than the most relevant or interesting. It may be the nature the beast but there's so much flotsam and jetsom that it's difficult to find the good stuff. I'm not sure about the methodology Technorati is using to spider the blogosphere but it's inconsistent. I came across a two-week old post by Ronald Gruia on Nortel on Technorati today that had apparently been posted five hours ago. It may have been that Gruia - a.k.a The Technology Futurist - isn't using a ping tool, or it may be that Technorati's spider took time to check out the post. Either way, it makes you think about the accuracy - or at least the timeliness - of Technorati's search results. From a personal perspective, Technorati does a terrible job tracking my blog even though I use the Technorati ping form every day. Many of my posts are days if not weeks old - if they appear at all. Could it be that I'm using Blogware rather than Blogger or TypePad? As far as what works for me when it comes to blog search, I find Feedster and Blogdigger to be better services. Feedster and Blogster may not have the same bells and whistles or Technorati - or the venture capital - but they do a good job. You wonder how long it's going to take Google to come out with a blog search engine. Perhaps Google will some of its cash to buy a Feedster, Blogdigger or Technorati. A more likely scenario is that Google has a small army of Phds already working on something. Another route is the development of a human-edited blog search service - sort of like what Yahoo did during the early years - where only the best blogs in each category would be listed. Some of the blogs would be added through in-house editors while many others would be through recommendations and the ratings of peers. I provided more details about this plan in a post earlier this year.