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Rating the top 5 blog search engines

Ever since launching Joe’s Goals and building out the As Seen On page (107 links and counting!) I’ve become obsessed with Blog Search Engines. I mean unnaturally obsessed, like a teenage girl at a Clay Aiken concert! Blog Search Engines totally brighten my day when they work and fill my soul with fish hooks and bitterness when they fail me. The one thing that is completely clear is that Blog Search is not perfect yet, and the ideal Blog Search engine has yet to be built. Unlike the relative stability of all the major web and news search engines, blog search is still burdened with poor availability and quality. Still, there are some bright spots out there and a few gems to find. Here are the top tier players with their pros, cons, and overall ratings (as assigned by me).

The big list

Google Blog SearchLike many of Google’s recent product launches their Blog search engine leaves something to be desired; especially considering that they now own and operate Blogger. Its interface is ok, presenting results in the well known Google glory, but the gaps in their database are huge! Many popular blogs go unnoticed and unindexed and their default relevancy search often provides very mixed results. The other major problem is that they maintain multiple copies of their index which means that you may see a post in their results at noon but when you run your search again (and connect to a different Google datacenter) that post is gone and you are stuck looking at yesterday’s results.
Pros: nice interface, quick searches, always available
Cons: mixed results, multiple indexes causing disappearing posts
Rating: 4 out of 10

TechnoratiIn many ways Technorati has been the gold standard in the pioneering frontier of blog search. Unfortunately Technorati has also begun to focus too heavily on their community at the expense of their search product. Many times their search service isn’t available and their result gaps (especially from smaller blogs) are often bigger than Google’s. That said, Technorati’s interface is slick and they provide tons of valuable information and tools for the average user. Overall I’d say it is the most refined product but is now becoming less and less competitive with the newer blog search engines.
Pros: number of inbound links, results sorted by date, topic hot links to show what is popular right now
Cons: mixed to poor results, service often has timeouts
Rating: 5 out of 10

FeedsterIf you want a nice search interface without the extensive features of Technorati then let me introduce you to Feedster. While it often isn’t known for search, it does provide pretty good results. The search page can be kind of slow but seems to have pretty good availability. Feedster’s features end with Date and Relevance results sorting so don’t expect to be able to use it as your primary blog search engine.
Pros: Simple interface, good results
Cons: No real features, not as many results as other engines, does not highlight term in results
Rating: 5 out of 10

Ice RocketIceRocket gives me hope that one day a young, up and coming search engine will be able to come along and seriously contend with Google in the web space. In many ways, it looks like an old style Excite/Infoseek search engine, but the blog results are phenomenal. It features a lot of the same information as Technorati, including a number of inbound links and trend charts giving you an idea how popular a phrase is. The default search results are sorted by date and the interface is typically pretty responsive. IceRocket isn’t the best, but they are a good and reliable second and, aside from a few missing results and occasional down time, the internet could easily survive with just IceRocket’s blog search.
Pros: good results, fast service, lots of useful features
Cons: not always the best results, sometimes not available
Rating: 7 out of 10

Ask.com Blogs and FeedsI never dreamed I’d actually recommend the product formally known as AskJeeves to anyone, but when they relaunched last winter they showed considerable spunk and ingenuity in producing both a top-tier web and map search but also the best dang blog search period. Hands down they blow everyone else out of the water. To start with their site is fast, very reliable, and results can be sorted by relevance and time AND popularity. With a single click you can start saving results to your Ask My Stuff page and with another click you can post a blog listing to Blogger, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, newsvine, etc. You can also easily add a blog’s feed to your favorite news reader, all from Ask’s search result page.
Pros: great results, good reliability, great interface
Cons: sometimes disappears for a while, results sometimes change on different index servers
Rating: 8 out of 10

What about Spam Blogs?

I decided to pull spam detection out of my list of factors because, in my testing, I was very happy with all of the various engines’ resistance to Spam Blogs. Blogs Search is a messy and inexact business, but overall the major blog search engines did a good job filtering out the obvious spam bot created blogs and finding content created by real authors. Sure, the more clever spammers get through, but they typically do it by providing content that, good or bad, may be of interest to the searcher.

Dishonorable mentions

Yahoo Blog Search. Ok, so Yahoo doesn’t really have a blog search. They do add limited blog results to their news search product and the results are high quality, but very limited in number. Yahoo also doesn’t keep the results around very long, maybe 30 days at best. I’m sure Yahoo will one day launch a Blog search product, but for now they don’t offer much.

GigaBlast. So far GigaBlast’s Blog search is a gigabust. I know I couldn’t build what they’ve built, but, then again, I wouldn’t want to. Poor performance, very limited results, and confusing interface (with their web-search-suggestions, called “giga bits”, invading the top half of the screen).

Bonus Stuff

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 3:12 pm and is filed under life hacks, tech bits. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Rating the top 5 blog search engines”

1

Hi Joe -

Came across your recap of blog search engines, and though it was well done. Keep me posted on how you think Feedster is doing as many ‘cons’ you mention are projects we’re actually working on.

Cheers
Brent

2

Thanks brent. Always exciting to see who stops by the check out what I’ve been working on. I’ve been using Feedster for search a lot more of late and still really like your simple outlook and interface. I was thinking about things that would make it better and the one big thing that came to mind (aside from term highlighting) would be number of inbound links. I could really see the value if typing a common word such as “Bush” and seeing that a article from Yesterday has 140 links and therefore is viral or popular.

Keep up the good work!