There seems to be no lack of entrepreneurs willing to take a crack at developing a new search engine – even if it means going to head to head with Google. Whether it’s Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Cuil or Blekko, there is no lack of search start-ups.
What’s puzzling about this search landscape is the lack of start-ups focused on blog comments. Sure, there’s BackType but it seems to be a lonely voice in the woods. In doing some research on comment search engines, it’s surprising to see so few options.
The question is why the dearth of comment search engines when there are dozens of general search engines, search engines focused on verticals such as travel, and search engines for Twitter?
Sure, there are social media monitoring and analytics services such as Sysomos that can show blog comments but there doesn’t appear to be search engines that simply focus on comments.
Is this an opportunity waiting for someone to capture, or are comments not interesting enough to warrant someone developing a search engine?
Who knows, it may be there’s no viable business model around comment search. But you still have to believe that in this you-can-build-it-so-built-it online landscape that now exists, there’s a smart person who would be willing to build a kick-ass comment search engine just for fun.
More: Speaking of comments, Mitch Joel has a post looking at whether or not comments should be offered as an option on a blog.
13 Comments
Mark
Comment search is being attacked more from the monitoring perspective, or from the real-time search side. As you have somewhat assumed, it would be difficult to build a business around comment search. YackTrack, the application I created "ages ago", started more as a "conversation tracker", but there is significantly more interest in monitoring.
Have you tried Boardtracker? I find it picks up quite a lot of comments from forum threads, but (at least for content in the UK) is rather slow to index them. E.g. my subscription to an RSS feed of search results included some "new" content from last year this morning.
I'll check out Boardtracker. Thanks for the suggestion.
Mark
Wordpress.com's search has the option to search comments too.
Sorry, forgot the link: http://en.search.wordpress.com/
The general idea is that the conversation is everywhere. Most of us online evangelists are talking about Blog postings on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and beyond. I think it's important to have the open platform, but I think it's more important to have the conversation where it's most likely to be interacted with by the most passionate people.
Mitch,
With comments happening all over the place, don't you think there's a need/appetite for a meta-comment search engine?
Mark
I wouldn't worry about us not having any competition right now. While building a comments search engine is relatively difficult — it took us months to reach the scale we're at now (hundreds of thousands of properties) — in the future, it will become easier to access comment-like data from popular services. For example, WordPress.com recently made all their comments searchable:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/comment-s...
I'd love to hear how you think we can improve search on BackType. You'll definitely start to see some improvements soon
> Who knows, it may be there’s no viable business model around comment search.
It's been fairly easy for us to make money from comment search — more than enough to operate the service without any "sales" etc.
Hi Mark,
You've certainly identified a hole in the social media monitoring space. Here at dna13 we are currently looking at providers in the space, and evaluating them for potential partnerships – as soon as possible. Having visibility into how blog posts engage other people is really important for big and small companies alike.
In the interim, I'm using Backtype too after meeting them at a trade show in the SV, and while the notifications are sometimes a little delayed – overall I'm found it quite useful.
Cheers,
Alecia O'Brien
@aobrien @dna13
http://www.dna13.com
Sounds easy enough to build. I think you'll see some pop up soon now that you've started the conversation and seeded ideas. What use case implies a willingness on some parties to pay?
lol it's a total hack application and not a 'search engine' but if you want to track keywords for twitter you can check out http://www.MyTwitterButler.com
I recently put together a search engine to identify blogs with dofollow comments:
http://geeklad.com/dofollow-blog-search
Basically, I crawl for blog comments, identify those that are dofollow, and build a list of blogs to use for a Google custom search engine. I once attempted to build a custom search engine to search Disqus comments but wasn't very successful.
Backtype definitely has a monopoly on it right now. In my initial attempts to build my dofollow search engine, I tried to duplicate what they had done on some level, but was unsuccessful. After taking a different approach I was finally able to do it.
I recently put together a search engine to identify blogs with dofollow comments:
http://geeklad.com/dofollow-blog-search
Basically, I crawl for blog comments, identify those that are dofollow, and build a list of blogs to use for a Google custom search engine. I once attempted to build a custom search engine to search Disqus comments but wasn't very successful.
Backtype definitely has a monopoly on it right now. In my initial attempts to build my dofollow search engine, I tried to duplicate what they had done on some level, but was unsuccessful. After taking a different approach I was finally able to do it.