Bloggasm

For my latest PBS article I had the opportunity to speak to representatives from both Technorati and Google blog search engines in order to piece together the blog search engine wars and the problems that still plague it: Can Technorati Beat Google at Blog Search?

“It doesn’t matter what Internet business you’re in,” Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of blog search engine Technorati told me recently. “You’re either going to have direct or indirect competition with Google and that’s just the way it is…[Google is] not the 800 pound gorilla, it’s the 80,000 pound gorilla.”

But unlike most competitors to Google, Technorati still seems to have a legitimate shot at beating Google in its niche. Though Google’s main search engine has been dominant, its Google Blog Search, launched in 2005, has failed to gain similar market share. And though some traffic analysis sites have reported that Google Blog Search is edging out Technorati in terms of search traffic, they also note that more than half of that traffic stems from links on Google News.

This weekend I was curious to see which bloggers were linking to my latest PBS article. So I did what I’ve been doing for years now and plugged the link into Google Blogsearch. The result? Google claims that my search did not match any documents.

I then turned around and plugged the same link into Technorati and found at least seven blogs that linked to the article. Okay, so maybe these just happened to be blogs not indexed by Google Blogsearch — that happens sometimes. But when I placed the regular URL for PBS’s MediaShift into Google, several of the blogs that had been indexed by Technorati showed up in the search. In fact they were showing up in the search precisely because they were linking to my PBS article.

So why didn’t they show up in my initial search? My theory is that Google Blogsearch for some reason no longer bothers to look for extremely long URLs. Therefore a URL like…

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/12/pulitzers-open-to-online-only-entrants—-but-who-qualifies347.html

… doesn’t get tracked, while a URL like…

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/

…does.

I’ve had similar problems trying to use Google Blogsearch to track video/Youtube embeds lately . I used to be able to pluck a URL from the embed code and track every single blog that embeds a particular Youtube video, but recently it’s been impossible, forcing me to go to Technorati.

Oddly enough, these complaints are the least of Google Blogsearch’s sins; the search engine has increasingly been returning incredibly shoddy results for weeks. Scott Rosenberg describes the problems succinctly :

The Google Blog Search results have generally been the fastest and most useful tool of this kind (Google displaced Technorati, which had long served in this role, some time ago). But a couple of months ago Google Blog Search started becoming pretty much useless. Instead of only reporting links from the “main” blog content, it reported all links on a blog page, including the so-called “sidebar” or blogroll, where many bloggers place a lengthy static list of blogs they read. So this means that, for instance, every time JD Lasica adds a new post to his blog at Social Media, which includes Wordyard in its blogroll, I get a new listing in the Google Blog Search for Wordyard, even though the post has nothing to do with Wordyard. This completely messes up the utility of Google’s search for me — and, from what I see posted by other serious bloggers, many other users.

So, a question: Why has Google been so silent on this issue? And why would it allow for these problems to go on so long without reverting back to the old algorithm and search methods? I understand they’re trying to change what is searched, but at the very the least they should keep the old system until the new one is perfected. If my search habits are an indicator, then they could be quickly losing market share to Technorati.

Because you know if Google is having to cut back, the rest of us are in trouble:

Google Gears Down for Tougher Times

Has anyone else tried to use Google Blogsearch this weekend? They’re suddenly pulling a Technorati and bringing back search results that aren’t from individual blog posts. So you might search for content and be brought to a blog because of something written on its sidebar or its blogroll, rather than within an individual blog post.

This has significantly muddied its results and will make my daily work much more difficult if it continues — it was already bad enough with all the Splogs it was indexing.

I left Technorati because Google Blogsearch was much more reliable and better at indexing content. Why do blog search engines seem to have so many problems?

So I’m an obsessed user of Google Blog Search, both for work and during my free time. It looks like I just got yet another reason to check it out often; it appears to be aggregating blog posts much in the same way that Google News aggregates articles on its front page.

It’s summed up neatly in this Wired article:

There were also mixed feelings because of the group’s attachment to Firefox, an icon of open source development and a hedge against Microsoft’s dominance. “The fear was that people were going to read this as sabotaging Firefox,” says Erik Kay, an engineer who joined the team in October 2006. The Googlers were mollified by the fact that their browser would be 100 percent open source: Google’s innovations could potentially find their way into the Mozilla codebase. “We really want to make Firefox successful, as well as other open source browsers,” Upson says.

Granted, this is only part of the reason. I also was hoping to wait until I buy a new laptop. My current one is now a few years old and I’m hesitant to download yet another browser onto it.

So you know Mark Cuban? The billionaire who is being considered to join the Yahoo board?

Well he just came out with the fucking dumbest grand idea on how Yahoo can beat Google: Pay the most popular sites on the internet $1 million each to remove themselves from the Google index.

So what happens after Google just decides to get rid of “no-follow” tags and no longer gives you a choice whether to be indexed? There goes $1 billion! And do you really think that the New York Times and CNN will give up their biggest traffic source for a lousy $1 million, giving their competitors a huge edge?

Everyone working at Yahoo probably has palm prints on their foreheads after reading Cuban’s post and watching their future careers go down the drain.