Blog Search Will Soon Be Extinct

You may have noticed there's a big space race going on to build the best blog search engine. One day IceRocket (which now features blogs as its default) is one-upping Technorati. The next day BlogPulse is throwing grenades at PubSub and so on and so forth. Everyone's trying to pick a winner, just as Yahoo!'s getting ready to crash the party. Well, here's my prediction - blog search as we know it today will be extinct in a few years...if not sooner.

For now, everyone in the Web search world is focused on relevancy, thanks to Google. But blogs and RSS are changing how we seek out content. Now people want to search for not only what's relevant, but also what's recent and popular (e.g. linked to). This is going to change how the Web search engines operate, particularly as more consumers begin to read blogs and subscribe to feeds.

For Google, Yahoo and MSN to continue to innovate, they will not only need to work on personalized search - the current holy grail - but also acquire or replicate specialized search engines like the ones above. What I want is to be able to do is sort all my Web results by date as well as relevance and link popularity - or in some combination of the three. Right now I can't. Doing so, as Chris Were describes, is no easy task. But increasingly, it will become what many searchers will crave.

So who's going to succeed first in merging relevance, recency and popularity into a killer Web search tool? I am not sure. Perhaps this is why Google has been slow to get into the blog search game. They're waiting until they can change it.

Comments

[Fred Zelders]

Steve,

I totally agree.

Feeds4all.Com (http://www.feeds4all.com) serves the possibility to search on Date OR on Relevance. You can make your own choice.

Feeds4All actual facts & figures: 18560 validated feeds |2049024 articles | 28199 enclosures.

[Seth]

The other variable in the whole search/blogsearch equation is video and audio. With more podcasts, vloggers and IPTV, the "next big thing" will be indexing and searching of metadata within all this non-text content.

[David Sifry]

Steve,

great points. Performance and scalability are job #1 right now, and we've been racking and stacking servers and working hard on improving the speed and user experience. BTW, have you given m.technorati.com a good test drive? It isn't only for mobile browsers - you should give it a try on a regular browser, and note the speed of the searches.

And I fundamentally believe that there's lots and lots of room for innovation in this space, we're going to keep focusing on building valuable interesting stuff while we build out the infrastructure to make sure it continues to scale...

BTW, thanks for all your support!

(BTW, something definitely seems to be screwy with Typepad this morning, I tried to add my blog URL (http://www.sifry.com/alerts/ ) to this comment form, and it told me the URL was invalid. Very strange.

Dave

[Jansen]

hi steve,

i agree that popularity does matter. would you see it will lead to social bookmark merging more into search engine?