Just What We Need… More Blog Search That's Not Very Good
from the this-is-progress? dept
A few weeks after Google finally got around to offering blog search, along comes Yahoo to do the same — and now we know why the two search giants have taken so long: neither of them is very good. They’re not bad exactly, but they’re nothing special. None of them are particularly comprehensive, and all of them have problems, which means that people end up giving up on blog search completely. You either get a lot of useless junk or you have to use about five different ones to get all the results you want (or, more likely you get both: the junk and multiple searches needed). That doesn’t help anyone. It just makes the information overload problem worse.
Comments on “Just What We Need… More Blog Search That's Not Very Good”
At least Google was first...
I agree that searching the blogs is a horrible waste of resources. Though the translation of most languages by the page is absolutely ahead of it’s time. Not perfected yet but by far an outstanding result of a corporate entity. Google.
The Juiciness
In other countries with differing standards of journalist ethics, we can often find more terrible news — like the starving Cambodian mother who tried to eat her daughter’s finger. Villagers believe she is possessed by a devil.
http://choxets.blog8.fc2.com/blog-entry-442.html
Search pattern languages
Currently I see we have two languages for searching – free-text with Google’s markup (`OR’ and +/- and various other things), or technorati’s tags system. Frankly, neither appeals all that much when you’re looking at some yank teenager blethering on about her lipstick, or whatever the blogsphere is doing today.
More to the point, there is still a dramatic difference between the number of people posting articles about a given topic, versus the proportion of people searching. For example, I wrote an article about the recent partial solar eclipse, tagged it `eclipse’ in technorati; for a couple of hours, my post was top of the search pile for that tag. Over the course of the subsequent 5 days, 109 separate impressions have been made on the photo-gallery in question, of which 1 has come from someone following technorati; the rest was word of mouth, friends & cow-orkers of friends spreading the word. I deduce that people simply are not using technorati tags for searching, and of course the delay in getting google to index your site is prohibitive when it comes to getting highly placed for rapid-changing events.
But why?
I’m not sure that I understand why anyone would want a blog search. I’m one of those strange people that actually lives in the real world, and only visits the virtual world for information or entertainment.
But I wonder why anyone would want to search for what some random stranger says. I have always been free to listen to the rantings of anyone that I meet, but I find that I don’t usually want to.
And by searching for their blogs, I know even less about them than if I actually met them…..and I might end up reading something from an idiot like Dorpus!!
At least Google was first...