I have been trying a number of blog search engines recently.
I have subscribed to searches for the same terms in Technorati, Ice Rocket, PubSub and Sphere.
Sphere is the newest player on the blog search engine block, only coming out of beta last weekend. The search is adequate - I searched for “technorati blocked by China“, a story I broke here and was heavily linked to and quoted as a result, but my post on this is not found by Sphere. The searches I subscribed to using Sphere again didn’t return as many results as the other search engines and did contain some spam!
PubSub produced the lowest number of results of the four compared and often the results were late i.e. they were found by the other search engines much earlier (often days earlier).
Ice Rocket produced by far the most results of any of the search engines but those results were full of spam - finding the real information amongst the spam was difficult!
And Technorati was still the best of the four. Very timely results and very little spam.
Conclusion
It is always advisable to use more than one blog search engine for subscribed searches. In this scenario I would advise using Technorati and Sphere. Although Sphere doesn’t yet have as many results as the others, it does appear to be improving.
Also, I had an issue with Sphere earlier in the week so I contacted the CEO, Tony Conrad - he replied to my email and had Steve Nieker the CIO follow up - it is great to see companies getting directly in touch with their users in this way.
Ice Rocket needs to seriously address the spam problem it has and PubSub, I’m sorry to say, looks like it is no longer at the races.
Niall Kennedy is a well known blogger, a vertical search veteran, a podcaster (with Om Malik) on the Om and Niall podsessions podcast, and a soccer coach! I will be interviewing Niall tomorrow (Fri 21st) in the late afternoon (sorry for the late notice - I only just got confirmation) for a podcast on PodLeaders.com.
Niall has worked for Technorati, shopping comparison engines PriceGrabber and NexTag, institutional investment search company Callan Associates, and business services search for American Express.
Most recently, Niall has accepted a job working for Microsoft’s Windows Live Division.
And most importantly, Niall is the proud holder of an Irish passport!
As always, if you have any questions that you’d like me to ask him, feel free to leave them in the comments or emil them to me at tom@tomrafteryit.net.
I see Dave Sifry (who I interviewed on PodLeaders.com a couple of weeks ago) has published a new quarterly State of the Blogosphere.
Dave’s main findings are that the blogosphere is still doubling in size every 6 months - so it is maintaining its rate of virtually exponential growth. The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.
The main points to note are:
- Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour and, most interesetingly,
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
Do you still think blogging is a fad?
I did a couple of tag searches on Technorati this afternoon - but they came up empty - I wasn’t so surprised with one or two of the more obscure ones I tried but when my search for the tag Google came up with the following message:
There are no posts with that tag yet. Please try again later or post one yourself! To contribute to this page, just post to your blog and include this code
I began to suspect there Technorati may be having some technical issues!
I will be interviewing David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati this weekend for a podcast on podleaders.com - as always, if you have any questions that you’d like me to ask him, feel free to leave them in the comments or emil them to me at tom@tomrafteryit.net.
Salim broke my head in this interview!
This was one of the most informative podcast interviews I have yet done - Salim introduced me to the concepts of structured blogging, and the feed mesh. Structured blogging is a whole new concept in web publishing which literally blew my mind - PubSub will be officially announcing Structured Blogging next Tuesday with Marc Canter (there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for Structured blogging yet - I got the scoop!).
If you publish on the web (if you are a blogger, for instance) you need to listen to this interview
The questions asked and the times in the interview I asked them are below:
Who is Salim Ismail and what is PubSub? - 0:32
What is PubSub? - 1:19
Is this something similar to Technorati’s Watchlists? - 2:01
What kind of people are using PubSub right now and what are they using it for? - 5:14
If a company (BUPA Ireland, for example) wants to use your service for brand management, they do what? - 7:27
You publish full feeds whereas Technorati publish partial feeds (presumably to bring people to their site), so how are you monetising this? - 9:22
No-one left any questions for you on my blog - is this due to PubSub being below most people’s radar? - 11:42
So if you are a job seeker or house buyer looking for houses or jobs with particular criteria…? - 18:30
What is structured blogging? - 19:32
So have you just destroyed Ebay’s model? - 27:27
The feed mesh? - 31:37
How soon will the tools for publishers be available? - 35:00
How are you going to monetise this? - 38:23
Do you listen to podcasts? - 40:22
Do you have any particular favourites? - 40:57
Download the interview here 9.7mb mp3.
We didn’t get to cover all the topics we wanted to cover in this interview so I will be publishing a follow-up next week - stay tuned!
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