“Traditional search is broken. It simply does not work for blogs”:
Traditional search engines only spider sites every one day to a few weeks, so they don’t reflect the latest postings. They have only a partial database of all the blogs that exist, and an average of one new blog is being created every second. Lastly, most traditional search engines such as Google rank posts primarily based on the number of incoming links. However, in the blogosphere, the most relevant post may not have any incoming links, simply because the most relevant post is so new.
The new blog search engine tools take the nuances of the blogosphere into account. They strive to correctly identify blogs and posts by their relevance, timeliness, and popularity. Eventually, more criteria will be added to their equations. As more and more websites incorporate blog-type functionality (frequent updating) and technology (RSS), figuring out how to search blogs will be more and more important.
A recent study shows that there is a huge discrepancy amongst the search engine pageranking systems:
There is obviously no perfect ranking system on the Internet–either for blogs or for web sites in general– and there probably never will be. Our recommendation is that PubSub try to focus their results on real blogs; too many of their results are commercial sites or blog utilities. Technorati needs to become more accurate in their counts of links. Bloglines and Feedster could be substantially improved if they took the next step and separated the blogs into categories. If your goal is to find the most influential bloggers, in a given category or overall, you’re best off using Technorati. The ideal system would incorporate elements from all of the services that we’ve discussed–link tracking, in-linking, feed subscriptions, tags, viewer ratings–and then find the best way to weight them. It’s a (much-disputed) truism of biology that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” but it’s happening here. Blog search engines and ranking tools are recapitulating the evolution of Web search engines such as Google. When Google launched, many thought that the search engine game was already settled, but Google became very powerful because it provided a truly superior search experience. There is room for just as much innovation in the blog search world.
My disdane for a-lists is well known. In my humble view, ideally we should dispose of any kind of ranking system that creates a class structure within the blogosphere. The only benefit that I can see it brings is for the ego of those who make it to the so-called a-lists.
But since we have to play the game by their rules, with a little help from my friends maybe the Bloke will make it to the big show. Wouldn’t that be a hoot. I’ll really be able to kick-ass then.
Show me love… link love that is.
