DISQUS

Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago

I suspect Google judges blog search as simply not worth the resources, given how little projected profit there is in it.

Blog search is actually amazingly niche, if you think about it - what much is there to search over blogs in specific, beyond ego and punditry-junkies?

Vanessa Williams · 3 years ago

Before I read this, I hadn't even heard of Sphere, but I've now started trying it out. One thing I'll note is that with blogs, search isn't everything. Though Technorati occasionally annoys me with poor performance, it's some of the other tools associated with the search functionality that are truly interesting.

Take for example the Buzz graph on Mathew's site for Myspace mentions. I have previously used this feature to try to get some idea of the relative traction of different technologies in the same space. For example: Sxip, LID, and OpenID in the identity 2.0 space. It turns out that LID has an order of magnitude more buzz going on about it, which means that if I have to choose only one to implement, it's probably going to be LID.

The bottom line is that I've never really thought of Technorati as a blog search tool. Also, I believe it's misguided to see blog search as a useless niche. What's relevant is that the blogosphere has structure and that structure can be mined to discover something about what's really going on in the public consciousness. Truly, Google has let a fabulous opportunity pass them by, perhaps because they prefer to keep the raw data about structure to themselves. For opening it up to the rest of us (at least in the blogging realm), Technorati still deserves some credit. If Sphere intends to be a Technorati-killer, let's hope they jump on the structure-mining bandwagon as well.

Mathew Ingram · 3 years ago

Good points, Vanessa. Thanks for the comment.