SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

September 23, 2008

Technorati Releases State of the Blogosphere 2008 Report

Technorati has started releasing the State of the Blogoshpere 2008 report. It will be a couple of more days before the full report is online.

The previous report was release in April 2007, so a lot has changed in the past year-and-a-half. Here are just some of the highlights:

Blogs are now a pervasive part of our daily lives. While there have been a number of studies conducted that tried to understanding the size of the Blogosphere -- both in terms of the number of blogs and blog readership -- all of these studies agree that blogs are now a global phenomenon that is "mainstream."

Technorati cites the numbers from three of the studies, which vary in the details but generally agree that "blogs are here to stay."

comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008) o Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US o Total internet audience 188.9 million

eMarketer (May 2008) o 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users) o 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%)

Universal McCann (March 2008) o 184 million have started a blog worldwide, 26.4 million have started a blog in the US o 346 million read blogs worldwide, 60.3 million read blogs in the US o 77% of active Internet users read blogs

Other findings include this: "All blogs are not created equal." There are only 76,000 blogs with a Technorati Authority of 50 or higher.

The majority of bloggers that Technorati surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it's paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.

Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. And one-third of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates.

There's lots more data -- and some eye-catching charts like the one above. Check out Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008 for yourself.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

May 23, 2007

Technorati Retools, Gets "Universal" Too

Technorati has gotten a "major refresh" that's six months in the making, according to founder and CEO Dave Sifry. The biggest change is a shift away from searching only blogs to include more kinds of user-generated content, including photos and video. Technorati's search technology is still tag-based, but now include more social media: Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more. They want all the good stuff out there, all in real-time, and we're using the power of 80 million bloggers to help organize it and make it fun to browse; using the wisdom of crowds as a mirror on ourselves.

In addition, Technorati has gone the same "universal" route as Google, eliminating search silos to return multiple media in the same results set, rather than having a separate search function for each category. Technorati has kept a blog-search-only option. Another way Technorati is similar to Google is the presence of a ticker across the top of the page highlighting popular searches, as Google is doing with its Hot Trends.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:01 PM | Permalink

May 6, 2007

Technorati includes "Authority" ranking of blogs

A tip of the hat to Ed Kohler over at Technology Evangelist for spotting that Technorati has a new way to rank blogs. Before last Friday, Technorati's ranking was by the number of inbound links. Now, it's by "Authority."

How do you calculate Authority? As Dorion Carroll explains, "Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has."

Isn't that the same thing by a new name? No, it isn't. As Carroll goes on to explain, "It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority."

So, for those who are focused on ranking, ranking, any ranking, how has this new definition changed The Technorati Top 100?

Engadget ranks #1. Boing Boing ranks #2. Gizmodo ranks #3. Techcrunch ranks #4. The Huffington Post ranks #5.

The Official Google Blog ranks #13. GigaOM ranks #33. The Topix.net Weblog ranks #35. Scobleizer ranks #38. Google Blogoscoped ranks #57. ShoeMoney ranks #60. Valleywag ranks #64. Micro Persuasion ranks #66. Matt Cutts ranks #72. Search Engine Land ranks #78. And the Online Marketing Blog ranks #96.

So, the change in Technorati ranking won't have the same impact as the Florida update to Google's algorithm did back in the fall of 2003. But I'm sure that it will cause more than a few ripples in the search engine industry.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:06 AM | Permalink

March 6, 2007

Blog Readers Are Loyal and Want to Be Entertained

Forget about getting that new puppy, if you want loyal, trusting, and eager to be entertained – just write a good blog. A new study on blog readership conducted by Ad Age and Vizu Answers has found that blog readers are loyal, trusting and eager for entertainment. Most readers read the same blogs regularly. Two thirds of study respondents read more than three blogs per day and a similar number of respondents indicated that they read for entertainment. Over half of the respondents (51.5%) judge the quality/trustworthiness of the information by the quality of the writing. The study also surveyed Spanish-speaking blog readers and found similar readership patterns.

Two findings are of special interest to search engine marketers looking for ways to grow traffic and gain credibility. The first is the finding that 67.3% of the respondents follow links to learn about new blogs. This provides a value for linking beyond SEO. The second is that blog readers rely upon recommendations on blogs (22.9%) more highly than simply finding a blog via a search engine (19.9%). Want credibility? Look to links from the community and the community's recommendation.

According to the study a good blog is well-written (43.9%), and for 43.6% the topical focus is what draws the reader to the blog. Looking to become a trusted source? Get a positive reputation, for this is how 38% said they judge credibility.

Although the readership of blogs has increased exponentially in just a few short years, most readers indicated that they used blogs as a tracking tool as opposed to a research tool. A full copy of the study is available at http://answers.vizu.com/pdf/Blog_Readership_Report_March_07.pdf.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 12:05 PM | Permalink

Bloggers, Journalists, and Parasites

Brett Tabke started an interesting thread over at WebmasterWorld with the choice title: Are Blogs a parasitic medium? The conversation ranges from those who think the answer to the question is yes, and those who think it must be a sick joke that tradtional journalists would apply such a label to anyone but themselves.

Gardener sums it up as follows:

I used to be a "traditional" journalist. Some news reporters do serious investigations and break new ground. However, those reporters are few and far between. The push these days is to turn out as much as possible. There's not a whole of investigating that can go on if you're doing a story every day or so. If you're not getting your story from a press release, or a news conference or the police radio, where do the ideas for these instant stories come from? Why, other media of course. A reporter will read a story, make one phone call, confirm the story, and suddenly it's theirs to report for free. The original source gets no credit. The fact that journalists are calling bloggers parasites is laughable.

My take on it is that there are definitely parasitic bloggers out there. It's much the same as that stupid debate about SEOs being slime sucking bottom dwellers (well, it was something to that affect). I stayed out of that one because getting into that conversation reminded me of the old question: "When did you stop beating your wife?". There is no win in such a discussion.

The point is that there are good SEOs and bad SEOs. And there are good bloggers and bad bloggers, and all sorts in between. Oh, yes, there are good journalists and bad journalists too. There are bad apples in every bunch everwhere you go. What distinguishes you from the pack is a combination of your ethics and your value add.

Good bloggers always provide full attribution to their source, and then do more than repeat the content. The blogoshpere is at its best when it's a conversation. Bloggers interacting with one another, each adding value at each step of the process.

Posted by at 10:45 AM | Permalink

January 18, 2007

Online newspaper blog traffic grows 210%

According to data released by Nielsen//NetRatings, the number of people reading Internet blogs on the top 10 U.S. newspaper sites more than tripled in December from a year ago and accounted for a larger portion of overall traffic to those sites. Unique visitors to blog sites affiliated with the largest Internet newspapers rose to 3.8 million in December 2006 from 1.2 million viewers a year earlier. Some of the growth stems from newspapers adding new blogs to their site that were not running in 2005, as well as readers' greater familiarity with the reading format.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 5:55 PM | Permalink

January 5, 2007

FeedBurner launches initial release of site statistics

FeedBurner's site statistics are now live. Their architecture conversion work after the BlogBeat acquisition is complete, and their free StandardStats service now enables their publishers to track both feed and site audience from their FeedBurner account.

FeedBurner's initial release of site statistics includes: * Visitor summary, detail and trends * Page summary, detail and trends * Referral and Search trends * Inbound referral traffic breakdown, grouped by domain and broken out in detail * Outbound click breakdown * Visitor city cloud and live geographic visitor detail * Percentage inbound traffic from search and the queries that drove the traffic * Percentage of visitors that are new to your site today * Browser and OS breakdown, with trend indicators * Detailed historical traffic by page and by date

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 3:15 PM | Permalink

January 3, 2007

Placeblogger: Searchable Directory for Local News Blogs

Yesterday, Placeblooger.com launched its searchable index of local blogs, placeblogs. The local blogs in this hand-assembled directory are more than just local news sites. They are sites that provide the texture of the culture and life of their local communities. Placeblogger was developed by Lisa Williams, who runs H2OTown with advice and support from Dan Gillmore's Center for Citizen Media, Jay Rosen professor of journalism at New York University and the author PressThink and Susan Mernit at Yahoo!

At launch the list included 700 placeblogs, a number that it is expected to rapidly grow. The intent is to grow a community and resources around this form of hyper-local blogging. The site today offers a searchable index and links to a placeblogger discussion list, the first steps toward developing a.community for locally oriented bloggers.

When I first heard Lisa Williams discuss this project several months ago at a meeting of the Berkman Thursday Blog Group meeting, I was excited by how many placeblogs were included in the project. These placeblogs fill a void left by the waning of local newspapers and the growth of online media.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 11:06 AM | Permalink

August 17, 2006

So Long Daypop & Blogdex

Back in 2003, I wrote about a number of blog search engines emerging at that time. Feedster was brand new and Technorati still pretty young. Both were babies compared to Daypop and Blogdex. Sadly, Gary Price over at ResourceShelf notes in A Brief Tribute to Dan Chan, Daypop, and MIT's Blogdex that neither of these pioneering services has made it to 2006.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:14 PM | Permalink

August 15, 2006

103 Links About SES San Jose 2006 (AKA The Big Recap)

Couldn't make it to last week's monster Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose? Well, maybe next time! In the meantime, I've compiled a list of coverage from across the web, even somewhat organized into topic areas.

Our San Jose show is always tough for me, as I arrive a week earlier to visit with the various major search engines out there. That means two weeks of news and email to dig out from, since you can never get it all done on the road. All that digging out means I know I don't have everything listed below. But you'll find plenty to keep you entertained.

General Recaps

Eric Schmidt Appearance

Eric Schmidt & Search Privacy

Click Fraud Panel & Related Coverage

Yahoo's Panama Ad Platform Preview

Social Search & Related Topics

Organic Listings Sessions

Search Advertising Sessions

Issues Sessions

News, Blogs & Public Relations

Big Sites/Budget Sessions

Small Sites/Budget Sessions

Conversion & Metrics

Other Sessions

Google Dance & Parties & Pictures

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:50 PM | Permalink

July 20, 2006

Ask.com Adds RSS Smart Answers

The Ask.com blog announced a new feature to its Smart Answers line up today. For example, if you do a search on se roundtable an abbreviation of my blogs name, you will get RSS feed results at the top from my blog. The Ask blog says that the initial list of sites included "was selected based on the most popular feeds chosen by our users in Bloglines."

Currently, I am not sure why it does not work for the query Search Engine Roundtable when it works for the abbreviated version. Note that it does work well for Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Watch Blog but it does not pull the SEW blog RSS feed, it pulls the SearchDay feed.

Here is a screen capture of the first query:

More details at the Ask Blog.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 1:56 PM | Permalink

June 8, 2006

IceRocket Sale To Think Is Off (Update: Discussions Still Going)

That deal for Think Partnership to purchase blog search engine IceRocket? Andy Beal notes that it's off.

Postscript: Think has second thoughts about IceRocket from the Texas Startup Blog has a comment from IceRocket that discussions are still ongoing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:16 AM | Permalink

May 8, 2006

Tech Memeorandum Gets New Name: Techmeme

Memeorandium's tech page has been on my essential reading list since it launched almost two years ago. About the only downside has been remembering the name. I'd always be misspelling it. Problem solved. Creator Gabe Rivera has given it a new name, Techmeme, and a new domain: techmeme.com. A bit more from him on the change here: Goodbye tech.memeorandum, Hello Techmeme.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:52 PM | Permalink

May 4, 2006

Searching for Quality RSS Feeds

RSS feeds offer a great way to pull relevant content from blogs, news sites and many other sources, but good ones can be difficult to find. Guest writer Mary Ellen Bates has found a new tool that helps you search for feeds from a variety of souces and easily aggregate them for reading. More about this goofily-named tool in today's SearchDay article, Do You Kebberfegg?.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:02 AM | Permalink

May 2, 2006

Sphere Blog Search Launches

TechCrunch has an outstanding review of a new blog search engine that recently launched named Sphere. What stands Sphere apart from the rest, outside of the user interface features? How Sphere determines and ranks sites based on "relevancy." Relevancy is based on "links in/out of blog; meta data around the blog (average length of posts, post frequency, etc; and a semantic analysis of the posts themselves)." I am going to be testing this out myself over the next few weeks, so I may have more for you then. Check out TechCrunch's review and read our review by Chris Sherman.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:04 AM | Permalink

April 25, 2006

A Well-Rounded Approach to Searching the Blogosphere

A new blog search startup called Sphere is launching today, with a different approach to finding content in the blogosphere. Sphere's creators are veterans of several internet startups who've applied the lessons they've learned from previous companies (Oddpost, Wordpress and others) to build a powerful, but easy-to-use blog search engine, with a number of interesting twists. I've got a full writeup of the new service in today's SearchDay article, Sphere: A New Approach to Blog Search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:10 AM | Permalink

April 14, 2006

Cuban's IceRocket Sold To Think Partnership

Cuban Sells Blog Search Engine from Red Herring covers marketing firm Think Partnership planning to purchase the IceRocket blog search engine, which is coowned by billionaire Mark Cuban. Terms aren't disclosed, but Cuban won't be making another billion off of this, safe to say. Red Herring estimates Think has about $20 million available, if this is a cash deal. Think seems to be hoping the purchase will help it spread its affiliate marketing work out further, perhaps to help form a new blog advertising network. Press release is here.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:16 AM | Permalink

April 3, 2006

Review Of Online Feed Reading Services

The State of Online Feed Readers over at TechCrunch has Frank Gruber taking a look at several online feed reading services, along with a big hunking chart o' features. Interestingly, the popular My Yahoo service doesn't get a nod for review, not being robust enough with the features it offers. Top speed honors go to Google Reader and FeedLounge, with Bloglines and Rojo best for feature sets overall. But me, I'm firmly a software-based feed reading person. I'll be sticking with RSS Bandit, which I reviewed on my personal blog here a few weeks ago: Reading Feeds With RSS Bandit. Of course, maybe FeedDemon 2.0 will tempt me away. Niall Kennedy recently gave it a rave review here: FeedDemon 2.0 raises the bar.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:56 AM | Permalink

March 27, 2006

Feed Rinse; Filter Your RSS Feeds

Traffick reviews this cool service that filters your RSS feeds for the content you want to read. The tool is named Feed Rinse and it enables you to filter by; keywords, tags, author, site, profanity, and more. This seems like a neat tool that you may want to try out. Traffick believes one of the larger companies may buy them shortly... Yahoo? Ask? Maybe Google?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:03 AM | Permalink

February 23, 2006

Technorati Adds Technorati Favorites

Technorati added a new feature Tuesday named Technorati Favorites. This feature allows you to add your favorite blogs and sources to your favorites list. David Sifry explains that this feature enables you to "monitor, search, and share your favorites." It is very easy to add your favorites, you can add them manually, click on a "favorites icon" in the Technorati search results page, bulk import them or use a bookmarklet. These favorites are viewable at your favorites page; for example, you can visit David Sifry's Favorites. If you run a blog, you post an Add to Technorati Favorites button on your site. To learn more about this feature, visit the Technorati Favorites Help page.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:16 AM | Permalink

February 14, 2006

Filter By Authority is Added to Technorati Search

Search Engine Journal reports that Technorati added an "authority slider" to its search engine. The search slider enables you to set the level "authority" you want to filter by; the filters include (1) "Any authority" that will show all results, (2) A little authority that will show results from blogs with at least one link, (3) Some authority that will show results from blogs with a handful of links and (4) A lot of authority that will show results from blogs with hundreds of links.

Dave Sifry of Technorati posts in his State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search blog entry, that the "Filter By Authority" "in no way should this imply a value judgment." Technorati uses link data to determine what is an "authority" and what is not. They are asking for feedback on this feature here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:29 AM | Permalink

February 7, 2006

Feedster Gets a New Look

A quick note to point out that "feed" search engine, Feedster, has undergone a makeover. Much cleaner and easier to read home page with a splash of color. The same look and color is also visible on search results pages. The Feedster blog has more about the new look including info about some new features.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:33 PM | Permalink

Tracking the Technology News Trackers

"Meme" trackers like Memorandum and Topix.net show you what's currently hot in both mainstream news and in the blogosphere. They're great services to help you keep up with both breaking news and trends.

Richard MacManus has put together an excellent summary of the current generation of these meme trackers, specifically looking at how they handle technology news and postings, and concludes:

All in all, Memeorandum still comes out trumps in terms of clustering layout, speed and relevancy. Topix.net and TailRank are strong services too. Also I suspect Chuquet and Megite will pick up the pace once they've enhanced their interfaces.

Read on for more in Rating the Meme Trackers.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 5:08 PM | Permalink

February 3, 2006

Don Dodge Chats with Memeorandum Founder, Gabe Rivera

Via Scobleizer, a very interesting interview by Don Dodge (ex AltaVista now at MS) with the founder of Memeorandum, Gabe Rivera.

From the Interview: Don Dodge: How do you compare Memeorandum to Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and others?

Gabe Rivera: For readers of Digg (or Reddit, and to some extent, Slashdot), I'd say Memeorandum is:

- More focused (on either "Tech" or "Politics")

- More expert/authority-driven

- Better organized, visually

Of course for a certain type of reader, Digg's quirkiness, developer

orientation, and community are all pluses. Many who aren't as interested in

these things prefer Memeorandum. Many use both sites. It's all good!

For the more ponderous set, I'd add that unlike all of those, Memeorandum

thrives on the web at large -- it doesn't keep its editors and content all

siloed and centralized. Viva la edge, yadda, yadda.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:38 PM | Permalink

Mossberg Positive About Rollyo and PubSub, Rollyo Adds New Firefox Search Bar Feature

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg has positive comments about two services, PubSub and Rollyo, two services that we've posted about several times.

Rollyo Sure, a power searcher could use advanced syntax and create a complex search string limiting their search to a number of domains and sites. However, the typical searcher doesn't have the time and very likely the skills to do this. Rollyo makes it very easy to "roll your own" search tool. Simply select up to 25 domains, enter the URL's, click "create" and now you have a database that only searches the domains you've selected. That's it. Rollyo is powered by the Yahoo web database. This blog post from late September (the day Rollyo launched) has much more.

The only significant weakness I discussed back in September remains a concern. What is it? You can only enter top level URLS like www.cnn.com, support.apple.com, etc. It's still not possible to limit your search to a portion of a web site. For example, if you wanted to create a "roll" that searched web pages from CEO's like Bill Gates at http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/ you couldn't do it. As of today, Rollyo will only search the entire www.microsoft.com site.

Overall, I'm still a fan not only of Rollyo but the concept in general. It's a great one that can be used in many situations and by many types of searchers. For example, think how a teacher could use it to create a specialty engine for their students.

Rollyo's person in charge, Dave Pell told me that he's aware of this issue and his team is working to improve the service including the option to search only a portion of a web domai and add new features.

New From Rollyo Speaking of new features, Rollyo has just added a cool feature that allows you with just a single click to create a search roll and then add it to your Firefox Search Bar.

PubSub PubSub is a matching engine that provides access to content with content containing your keyword terms as they're published (close to real time) from over 14 million content sites (blogs, news sites, other feeds like SEC filings) and then deliver these results to you via an RSS feed, on a web page, or via the VERY useful PubSub sidebar that alerts you to new content that matches your keywords as they hit the PubSub database. Btw, if you or want to create a more precise search PubSub offers a good selection of search operators and features that can help. I realize that most people will not take advantage of these advanced features but PubSub should do more to promote them. Again, a little training can go a long way. I've also blogged on several occasions that I like what PubSub has done by creating pre-built advanced queries (built by a professional researcher) for various topics. PubSub Government is one example.

More SEW Blog and SearchDay on PubSub + PubSub Gains Community Lists To Rank Top Blogs By Topic + PubSub Offers Real-Time Feed of Earthquake Information + Managing the Firehose of Real-Time Information

Posted by Gary Price at 12:05 AM | Permalink

January 17, 2006

Buzzmetrics and Intelliseek Join Forces and then Merge with Nielsen

Some big news from the blog buzz and measurement scene aka online consumer-generated media tracking and analysis. Steve Rubel posts that:

+ BuzzMetrics has acquired Intelliseek. As you know, Intelliseek offers a number of consumer-geneated media measurement services that include the BlogPulse blog search and buzz site.

and then

+ BuzzMetrics sold a majority interest of the company to Nielsen which is part of media powerhouse, VNU. The new company will be known ad NielsenBuzzmetrics.

Steve's post does a great job breaking down this merger and acquisition. He writes: The takeaway here is that it's very hard to build knowledge about the world of consumer generated media if you're not culturally built for it. It's much easier and faster to buy this knowledge, rather than building it on your own. Consumer generated media simply moves too fast.

Additional details in this official news release.

A conference call and webinar took place a few hours ago and an archived version of the event should be available soon.

Postscript: Holtz.com has posted a new 26 minute podcast interview with Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek?s Chief Marketing and Customer Satisfaction Officer.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:47 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Nabs SearchFox Assets

I never used SearchFox nor heard much about it, but they announced last week that they'd be closing. Techcrunch now says that's because Yahoo's acquired its assets and some of its employees. Michael at Techcrunch makes a good point that the closure might be because Yahoo bought the service or equally because Yahoo decided to grab the crumbs after the closure was announced.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:35 AM | Permalink

January 12, 2006

TailRank: A Social News Recommendation and Filtering System Gets a New Look

Scoble points out that Tailrank a service that, "finds the best content from thousands of blogs" (think digg or Memeorandum) that provides a "custom ranking specific to the user" (think Findory) has a new look and design.

TailRank also offers a mobile version (cool!) an API and is searchable. Registered members (free) can also import blog subscriptions to build a personalized reading list. Findory's personalized reader which was released last September also allows you to import your blog subscriptions.

The TailRank home page has a feature-filled left column that allows you to focus the page by time (1 hour, 2, hours, etc.), view "hot" tags, and find links to "hot" posts.

Registration (not required unless you want more personalized results) is simple and fast. Once registered you can add tags to items you read via the service and are also given additional tools to narrow your results page. You an also add your comments to any entry.

Although the TailRank home page mentions it finds material from blogs I also quickly spotted material from mainstream news sites like MSNBC and ABC News. I also found press releases like this one from the Nikon UK site and pages from company web sites.

Finally, most TailRank entries includes an image of the page, a permalink link, a text snippet, and and a number with the total amount of inbound links to it. Clicking the "inbound link" link shows you where the links are coming from.

TailRank comes from San Francisco and is lead by Kevin Burton, a co-founder of NewsMonster and Rojo.

I'm looking forward to spending more time with the service, especially its mobile version which might be great for quick pop-ins to see what's happening in areas I'm interested in. More later.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:36 PM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Technorati Adds Trend Charts, Other Features, Rubel Offers "Hacking" Tips

Via Micro Persuasion, this post from the Technorati blog pointing out several new features that are now available including a blog finder widget, trend charts (enter a term, see how many posts in the past 30 days mention it) and improved extracts (what others call snippets.)

For more Technorati fun, take a look at this post from Steve Rubel from early last month: Ten Technorati Hacks. I wonder if Steve or someone from Technorati is talking to O'Reilly about a book. (-:

Posted by Gary Price at 2:56 PM | Permalink

December 26, 2005

BlogPulse Releases List of Top Blogs, Blog Posts, and More of 2005

The last two weeks have been busy with the release of "Top Search" lists and rankings from all of the major search players. We've blogged them all. What about the blogosphere itself? Well, the BlogPulse team has release their year-end review.

It includs this list of the Top 25 Blogs of 2005*: 1 Boing Boing 2 Engadget 3 Michelle Malkin 4 Albino Blacksheep 5 Instapundit.com 6 Power Line 7 Gizmodo 8 Think Progress 9 Political Animal 10 Slashdot 11 Little Green Footballs 12 Eschaton 13 PostSecret 14 AMERICAblog 15 Captain's Quarters 16 Talking Points Memo 17 Penny Arcade 18 Business Opportunities Weblog 19 Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger 20 Gawker 21 BuzzMachine 22 The Huffington Post | The Blog 23 Informed Comment 24 The Volokh Conspiracy 25 Wonkette

You'll also find rankings for:

  • Top Blog Posts
  • Top Media Sources
  • Top Media Stories
  • Top People
  • Top Movies
  • Top Video
  • Top Audio
  • Top Images
  • Top Female Entertainers
  • Top Male Entertainers
  • Top Wikipedia Reference

2005 was also a busy year at BlogPulse. This SearchDay story takes a look at what this blog buzz and search tool began offering at the end of July. In October, Blogpulse announced a deal with AOL.

* Well, we didn't make the list. Oh well, that's the way it goes. No worries here. We've tried our very best to make the SEW Blog a resource that you find informative, useful, thought provoking, and enjoyable each and every time you visit. Allow me to thank you for your constant supply of kind words during the past 12 months. We sincerely appreciate your neverending support.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:16 PM | Permalink

December 20, 2005

With One Link, Google Book Search Becomes Google's 5th Most Popular Service

Google Print Is Google's Ninth Most Popular Service here on the blog last month covered how according to Hitwise, Google Print -- since renamed Google Book Search -- made the top ten of most used Google services, though usage was only by a tiny 0.4 percent of Google visitors. Since then, a small change by Google has dramatically increased the visits to Google Book search and pushed it into being the fifth most popular service it offers.

Bill Tancer of Hitwise, who loves nothing more than to play with the stats his competitive analysis service has on user behavior, dropped me an update yesterday showing how the Google top ten line up had changed from the last time I wrote about it. Here's the rundown:

Service

Week Ending Nov. 5

Week Ending Dec. 10

Point Change

Percent Change Google Web Search

79.9%

79.1%

-0.9%

-1.1% Google Image Search

9.2%

9.3%

0.1%

1.2% Google Mail/Gmail

5.6%

5.4%

-0.3%

-4.5% Google News

1.6%

1.5%

-0.1%

-4.4% Google Book Search

0.4%

1.5%

1.1%

322.9% Froogle

0.7%

0.9%

0.2%

33.3% Google Maps

0.8%

0.7%

-0.1%

-13.3% Google Earth

0.3%

0.5%

0.2%

69.0% Google Groups/ Groups 2 Beta

0.5%

0.5%

-0.1%

-9.4% Google Directory

0.2%

0.2%

0.0%

6.3%

As you can see, Google Web Search remains the most used service by far. Google Book Search, which had been the ninth most popular service, moved up to position five.

Notice the point change and percent change columns. The first shows the raw percentage point change between the two time periods. Google Web Search had a dip of less than 1 percent, so no major change. Google Book Search had a point change of just over 1 percent. In the case of that service, this was a big deal.

Why? The percentage change column tells the story. That 1 percent point increase for Google Book Search means relatively speaking, it went up over 300 percent in traffic -- more than three times the number that used it a month ago are now turning to the service. In contrast, a 1 percent change either way with Google Web Search is a drop in the bucket.

So what gives? What happened? Cast your mind back to mid-November, when Google started putting at the bottom of regular search results pages this message:

Try your search again on Google Book Search

For more on that change, see Google SERPs pushing Google Books at our SEW Forums, When Will Google Do An Amazon at Smart Keywords and Google Book Search Within SERPs at Search Engine Roundtable.

Was the change responsible for the increase? And what about Google Groups, which has had somewhat similar promotion on the bottom of results? The chart tells the tale:

You can see that just after Google Book Search links were added, traffic to Google Book Search skyrocketed. Being on the first page of search results is clearly powerful, as search marketers obviously know. As for Google Groups, it didn't change. This may be because Google Groups links never always appeared, in contrast to Google Book Search links, which seem to always show up. It could also be that more people find the Google Book Search link more relevant.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:57 AM | Permalink

December 15, 2005

Technorati Begins Cooking Up Ideas in their New "Kitchen"

Let's see, Yahoo offers betas at Yahoo Next, Google at Google Labs, Microsoft in their Sandbox, and AOL on their Beta Central page. I could go on but that's enough for now.

Today, Ben Charny at eWeek reports on where Technorati is now "cooking up new" ideas. Yes, what Charny refers to as half-baked ideas (aka betas) are now available in the Technorati Kitchen.

Right now, just one beta is available. It's called Explore and according to the site it allows users to find out what, "bloggers are saying right now on any topic, organized by how many links their posts are getting. Think of it as a newspaper front page for any subject."

In other words, posts organized by category. Remembering that this is a beta and lists posts by inbound links, I think I'm sticking with Topix.net's NewsRank algorithm and even the free version of NewsNow.co.uk for automated categorization of news and blog posts. Topix added blogs to their mix a few weeks.

Kudos to Sifry, Kennedy, and crew on the new site and a great name. We're looking forward to seeing what's next out of the oven and what improvements you make to Explore.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:50 PM | Permalink

December 11, 2005

Create Your Own Collection Of Searchable RSS Feeds With ScoopGo & Blogdigger Groups

A quick post to point out Tara's recent item (when Tara writes, we read) about ScoopGo, a new tool that allows the user to create a searchable database of whatever feeds they choose (up to 30). Overall, Calishain is positive about the service and says she looks forward to seeing it evolve. I agree.

The concept of creating a personalized search engine based the feeds you select is not a new concept. In fact, a service I mentioned a week or so ago has offered what they call a "groups" feature for quite some time.

Blogdigger Groups (BG) is what I'm talking about and comes from Blogdigger, an RSS engine built and maintained by Greg Gershman and Mike Miller of Baltimore. BG is a service I'm finding more and more uses for.

Blogdigger Groups is not without its issues but Greg tells me that they're doing their best to make the service easier to use and more reliable especially in keeping the most current feeds crawled and searchable.

Here's how BG describes itself: Blogdigger Groups allows you to combine the contents of two or more blogs making the combined content easily accessible all at once.

In a nutshell (and a small nutshell at that) here's how it works: + You can search your feeds as a single group or one at a time. + Export your group into OPML or OCS + Receive your group as its own RSS feed + Sort results by date or relevance + Groups can be public or private

Let's Create a Personalized Group of Search Feeds: + Input title and Contact info + Determine the type of group (public or private) + Decide Group Password + Decide Moderated or Unmoderated, Create Password if Needed + Click to create group

Now, start entering the feed urls or import a list using OPML. It's that easy. As an example, take a look at this group, Search Stuff, that includes the blogs from several engines and web tools. Something similar here. More examples here.

As I mentioned earlier, Blogdigger Groups has been undergoing some growing pains of late but Greg is on top of it, so keep an eye on this easy to use and increasingly useful search service.

Postscript: The question has come up if it it's possible to easily create a limited or focused type of search engine using the database of a large general purpose web engine? The answer is yes. Of course, a power searcher could do all sorts of things to limit to specific domains but that's well beyond the scope of most people. A fairly new service called Rollyo allows the user to create a focused engine based on up to 25 urls using Yahoo. Select, enter, and go. In this SEW Blog post I offer an overview of Rollyo and point out both its strengths and weaknesses.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:39 PM | Permalink

December 6, 2005

Links to RSS Feeds and Podcasts from the U.S.Government

Here's a quickie set of reference links for you. If you're looking for RSS feeds and podcasts from U.S. Government, FirstGov offers a couple of useful directories with links to both types of material.

+ U.S. Government RSS Library Browsable by topics that include health, business and economics, and science.

+ Podcasts from the U.S. Government At the moment, 11 podcasts are listed.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:50 AM | Permalink

November 20, 2005

Feedster Beta Tests "FeedRank" Sort and WordPress Only Search

I noticed a change on one of Feedster's UIs today (the one at FeedSter.net to be specific) that allows a searcher to choose to see their results sorted by "FeedRank" in addition to being to date or relevance sorts. The FeedRank sort is a beta and is NOT visible on the primary Feedster.com url.

So, what is FeedRank? How does it differ from other sorting options? According to Feedster's CTO, Scott Johnson, FeedRank is a very early beta that was "tossed up" on Feedster's developer site to see how users would react to it. Scott told me that, "essentially what it does is to search at both the feed AND post level and attempts to give you posts from the best blogs matching your query." He added that in the next week or so Feedster will join several other search tools and allow users to tweak the weighting of FeedRank results using a graphical "slider".

Btw, in other Feedster news, they're now offering (beta) a WordPress only "Content from blogs on WordPress.com" search. More on the Feedster blog.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:12 PM | Permalink

November 13, 2005

MSN 's Live.com and Start.com Offer "Feed" Only Search Tab

It looks like MSN continues to slowly release its feed search tool. In August, Danny and others posted about two "undocumented"* pieces of MSN Search syntax that allowed you to limit your search to only material that comes from feeds.

Well, that was 2 months ago and now via either the new Live.com or the Start.com sites you'll find a tab that allows you to see only material coming from feeds. Needless to say, this is still early (very) beta stuff and lots of work needs to be done.

To keyword search only "feeds," enter your terms in the main search box (duh!) and then click the "Feeds" tab. You can also search feeds by selecting the "Add Content" link in the left column.

What's Available + Option to click and subscribe to feed on Start.com or Live.com page + Cache of each post, in some cases a date is provided + It seems that some of MSN's advanced syntax (ie: intitle, language, etc.) works

What's Not Available + Sort by date + At this point I was only able to find posts about two days old

* Those pieces of syntax are not documented on this MSN help page.

Postscript: MS's Live.com now works with Firefox.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:13 PM | Permalink

November 9, 2005

IBM Joins Corporate Monitoring Space with Release of Public Image Monitoring Solution

According to this article from News.com, IBM is joining other players in offering services that monitor a company's "image" using the web mentions, blog postings, etc., via a new service named Public Image Monitoring Solution.

The story notes that IBM is currently testing the service with it's corporate partners (including Factiva and NStein) and Morgan Stanley.

IBM originally developed OmniFind to index and search information that resides within corporate networks. But it found that some customers were keen on learning what outsiders were saying on the Web about a given corporation, said Marc Andrews, IBM's director of strategy and business development for unstructured information.

"Organizations are struggling to understand what people are saying about them in public," said Andrews. "That ends up having an impact on opinion and buying decisions."

Andrews on Monday demonstrated a prototype where a marketing department of an automotive firm could search through blogs, news stories and newsgroups to gauge consumer feelings.

The article doesn't mention if any of IBM's WebFountain technology has been incorporated into the product but my hunch (which can be wrong) is that it has.

For more, see these news releases from IBM, Factiva and NStein.

Other SEW Blog posts of interest: + Factiva Launches New Service to Help Execs Measure Company Reputation Note: Intelliseek also helps power this service. + A Blogosphere Buzz/ Web Trends Tool From Accenture

Posted by Gary Price at 7:29 PM | Permalink

November 8, 2005

MyCroft Plugin Available for Clusty Blog Search

A very brief note to point out that Clusty's blog search option that I wrote about a few months ago now has a MyCroft plugin for your Firefox browser toolbar.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:51 PM | Permalink

PubSub Gains Community Lists To Rank Top Blogs By Topic

Tara at ResearchBuzz talks about PubSub's new Community Lists, human compiled lists in various topics. There are four so far, for Law, PR, Fashion and Librarians. Great idea, but we'll see how well it scales. What would be really cool would be focused searches you could do of posts within one or more of these communities. Want to be an editor and create a list, hmm, say one for search? PubSub's looking for people and more details are on the Community Lists home page. Don't forget to include us! PubSub Community Lists gives you more details of those behind the existing lists from Steven Cohen, who runs the librarian list.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:03 AM | Permalink

November 6, 2005

15,000 Blogs Added to Topix.net Database

Material from 15,000 blog sources have been added to the Topix.net database. Topix.net already contains material from 12,000 mainstream media sources. Items from blogs and mainstream sources are mixed on topical "feed" pages and search results pages. Topix CEO, Rich Skrenta, has the details (including some great charts and stats) on the company blog.

If you've never visted and/or used Topix.net, it's more than worth a look. I use many times each day (it was one of my top new resources for 2004) either as a news search tool or by browsing some of the more than 300,000 topical "feeds" and 30,000 local feeds that are constantly updated. Btw, Topix also does a great job of separating press releases from other content (look for the PR Scan link in the left column of every page). Channels are available for every Zip Code in the U.S. (and most postal codes in Canada) as well as celebrities, industries, and much more. I find material via Topix I either don't see elsewhere or see it using Topix first. Every channel can be viewed on the Topix site or can be via RSS.

So, let's get to today's news from Topix.net about the addition of content from more than 15,000 blogs to their crawl of more than 12,000 news sources.

Highlights + Blog posts are currently highlighted in a tan/manila box to separate them from mainstream media. This is most likely a beta and will not be the final UI.

+ Topix crawls both RSS and HTML. However, Rich Skrenta tells us that it's an RSS crawl for most of the blog content.

+ "Posts should show up on our site and search index within 1-3 minutes of being crawled." Note: Our blog as well as the DocuTicker site I edit were fortunate enough to be two of about 500 blogs that have been in the Topix index prior to today. I can say that many times I was able to find something I posted in Topix within a VERY and I mean a very few minutes.

+ The Topix blog post offers a pie-chart comparing the amount of posts (by topic) from weblogs versus what Topix calls "mainstream media." Interesting. The only thing I'm unclear about what is precisely a blog and does the definition vary from blog to blog? For example, does a "blog" from the BBC, Washington Post or MSNBC count as a blog or a mainstream source? I'll admit that this is a gray area as blogs become more mainstream. Just how a blog is defined these days is very debatable.

+ The numbers. Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta offers some insights and numbers the "real" number of blogs out there versus the amount of spam blogs that exist. Very interesting and some might say, amazing numbers that will sure have people talking. I'll leave it at that for now. Tag the following numbers: wow. (-:

While the total number of unique feeds that have ever existed, or blogging accounts that have ever been signed up can certainly be counted, what is far more relevant to us is the composition of the daily posting stream. [My emphasis] What we're seeing is that 85-90% of the daily posts hitting ping services such as weblogs.com are spam (take a look for yourself). Of well-ranked non-spam blogs that we've discovered, we've found about half haven't been updated in the past 60 days. Our filters sift through what's left, which even after discarding 95%, is still a great deal of good material.

Why 15,000 Blogs? Who Made the Selections? So, how did Topix choose the 15,000 blogs that are now in the database? Skrenta explains that more than 1 million blogs were crawled and then ranked using their NewsRank algorithm that looked at blog posting frequency, writing style, type of reference, popularity, etc. We also learn that 15,000 blogs is an arbitrary number and Topix hopes to add more (lots more) moving forward.

Adding Your Blog If you're blog isn't included in the Topix crawl, you can submit your blog (and give feedback on the service) here.

This is all very new and I look forward to seeing how useful the blog content is versus what I've been finding from Topix over the past year. One feature that would be good to have is an option to toggle either blog content or mainstream media content on or off both topical pages and the advanced search interface.

More later.

See Also: An OJR interview from earlier this year with Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles from Topix.net

Posted by Gary Price at 10:51 PM | Permalink

Feedster Beta Testing Podcast Search Tool, Adds "Official" News Provider Search

I just noticed on the Feedster home page that Feedster is now beta testing a "podcast" only search tool that current indexes (there numbers) 27,482 podcasts. I also noticed another new tab on the Feedster homepage that offers a "news" only search from "official news providers." Interesting. I would like to learn more on what makes an official news provider, official. No info on the official Feedster blog about the betas. However, the blog Socklabs from a person who works at Feedster, points out both of these new additions and also notes that Feedster has been growing their index of Asian blogs.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:42 PM | Permalink

October 20, 2005

A Splog Press Review

Danny wrote an in-depth look at the "splog" issue the other day and since then many other articles have been written on the topic. Here are links to just a couple of them:

'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google Source: Wall Street Journal (Registration Not Required)

From the article: Just this past weekend, Google's popular blog-creation tool, Blogger, was targeted in an apparently coordinated effort to create more than 13,000 splogs, the search giant said. The splogs were laced with popular keywords so that they would appear prominently in blog searches, and several bloggers complained online that that the splogs were gumming up searches for legitimate sites.

Many spammers are buying special software on the Web that allows them to automatically create scores of phony blogs in mere seconds. One program cited by splog critics is BlogBurner, which starts at $47 a month. The tool "creates a unique blog for your Web site in less than one minute -- even if you know nothing about computers," according to the BlogBurner.com site. BlogBurner's founder, Rick Butts, denies that his software is used by spammers. He says it is used by business owners to automatically create blogs based on content pulled from their Web sites. He acknowledges that the blogs being created by BlogBurner are often used to help draw attention to a company's main Web site. "I'm not going to pretend to say we're altruistically creating blogs for humans to read," he says, adding that other companies have mimicked his software and sold it to spammers.

The WSJ article also takes a brief look at another issue, some might call it a problem, involving blogs, spam posted in the comments section of blogs.

Tempted by blogs, spam becomes 'splog' Source: News.com

From the article: The scope of the attack, and the sophisticated automation used to accomplish it, mark a turning point for splogging, a problem experts say has been building for some time.

Unlike e-mail programs, blogging services don't have the capability to easily detect and filter out spam, said Bob Wyman, chief technology officer at blog search and tracking service PubSub. [Google's Jason] Goldman [product manager for Blogger], admitted that the weekend attack showed that those preventative tools are "broken" and serve as deterrents rather than outright solutions. He also said Google launched a feature Wednesday that would force suspected spammers to transcribe distorted words before pushing through individual blog posts. And he said Google is not alone in being attacked. "Weblogs in general are having a problem with spam right now, not just Blogger," he said. "While it is a problem, it is certainly not the majority case on BlogSpot, at all."

Posted by Gary Price at 10:30 AM | Permalink

October 19, 2005

Tips On Tapping Into RSS For Info

Some very nice tips from Steve Rubel today about how to get more out of RSS feeds. He covers ways to make feeds for your favorite writers via Yahoo, keeping up on news about your car via Topix, discovering new audiobooks, discovering cool stuff via del.icio.us, using Gada for all-in-one search feeds, tracking changes to a Wikipedia page via RSS (awesome tip there) and more.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:34 AM | Permalink

October 18, 2005

All the News that's Fit to Crawl

News search engines and headline aggregators are playing an increasingly important role in the way people consume online news. These services offer a wealth of information from news sources and blogs all over the world, making it easy for a reader to take in multiple opinions. But these services also offer intriguing opportunities for savvy search marketers to get even broader distribution, if they follow a few guidelines for optimizing content. Guest writer Shari Thurow has the scoop in today's SearchDay article, Meet the News Search Engines.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:09 AM | Permalink

October 17, 2005

Problems With Splogs & Time-Based Searching

How the wheel turns. Back in the 1990s, portals gave away free home pages and with them came a huge amount of search engine spam. Today, portals like Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL give away free blog space -- and lo and behold, we have blog spam that apparently hit a new high with a blog spam emergency this weekend, as Tim Bray writes. The blogosphere has been buzzing with discussion on the problem.

As for myself, I just continue to shake my head that these type of spam issues with blogs simply weren't expected. The solution? It's likely going to be just like what happened with free web space -- free blog space will get ignored by search engines.

Come along, and we'll do a tour of past and present, plus a look at the issues you get when you try to maintain quality when also ranking search results by time.

1997: Free Home Pages & Spam

First the past. It was around 1997 when free web space for personal home pages seemed to become more accessible to many people. I remember it well, because soon after, I started getting complaints from those making use of these services. Search engines weren't finding all of their pages, they found. Some discovered that none of their pages got indexed at all.

It got so bad that eventually, I had to do an article about it. Search Engines And Free Web Pages still floats around in the SEW Archives area for our SEW members. Here's the top to it, which will sound really familiar when I start talking about blog spam later on:

Many people take advantage of free web space provided by their internet access providers. What they don't realize is that search engines have shown a tendency to miss or even ignore certain sites. Complaints have been heard from those using space provided by America Online, CompuServe and other places.

Indeed, AltaVista no longer even accepts submissions from Tripod, a popular web service that provides free space. Why? Search engine spammers were using free space there as a base of operations. It's easy to open up a new account, hit the search engine with bogus pages, then move on once the spamming attempt is detected.

At that time, it was more the internet access providers giving away space, rather than portals. But not long after, portals jumped in themselves, culminating I'd say with Yahoo's $3.6 billion acquisition of GeoCities in 1999.

Search spam hosted on free web space had died down as a problem by that point, however. Why? It was both because search engines were largely ignoring these areas of the web and because these areas were ignored, they no longer were attractive magnets to spammers. No one wants space that can't be seen.

2005: Free Blogs & Splogs

Now let's skip ahead to today. Well, more specifically to yesterday, when Mark Cuban who backs blog search engine IceRocket wrote in his Get Your Blogspot Shit Together Google post:

The blogosphere was hit by a blogspot.com splogbomb. Someone did the inevitable and wrote a script that created blog after blog and post after post.

I'm not talking 100 blogs with a 100 posts each. Im talking what could easily turn into 10s of THOUSANDS of blogs pinging out millions of posts!

Do a search for HDNet on Icerocket.com or any of the other engines and look at all the Splogs there are. And they have URLs like this So google, at least for the time being, we shut out adding new blogspot posts to our index until we clean all the bullshit you dumped on us out of our indexes.

Sound familiar? I mean, just change the names, and the result is the same. Blogs are simply more sophisticated home pages, for many, as I've written. And splogs (spam+blogs) are just more sophisticated home page spamming attempts.

Allow anyone to create content for free or with no real barriers, and surprise, a few people will go to extremes and be abusive. Result? IceRocket no longer trusts the free blog space that Google offers through Blogger/Blogspot, in the same exact way that many search engines stopped trusting the free web space of the GeoCities of the past.

Google's Failure To Police Or Post Barriers

Google: Kill Blogspot Already!!! from Chris Pirillo also went up Sunday. As with Mark Cuban, Chris finds Blogger's Blogspot-hosted blogs the chief culprit.

I don't know what's (specifically) making it so insanely easy for these spammers to get signed into your system, but you need to change that....

Suggestion, Google? As bold as this might sound, you should institute an authentication system - a captcha of sorts - for every single post that gets sent through your Blogger service. This means that there's no more easy rides for the idiots out there who are killing your baby and the blogosphere.

Fair enough -- some barriers to entry would help, either in setting up the free space (captchas, charging a token fee, whatever) in the first place or perhaps even in how people are allowed to post.

Google's certainly winning no points with me on this front. Back in June, I wrote My Encounter With Search Spam On Blogger, where I talked about someone that lifted a description from the Search Engine Watch web site in a misleading manner, the same person who had lots of other splogs going, as well. In addition to writing about it, I also went through the formal reporting channels. Nevertheless, there it sits still.

But Barriers Won't Solve Issues For Blog Owners

Of course, it won't help if only Google cleans things up. I haven't checked, so apologies if I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that I can get going with free space over at MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360. Google's Blogger is simply a more well known service. Closing down abuse at Blogger would be great, but I suspect that just means the abuse will move elsewhere.

For potential bloggers, I'm afraid my advice about free home pages from back in 1997 will become just as applicable to free blogging space:

That may seem unfair [search engines ignoring free web pages], but when you use free web space, it's as if you have hundreds of roommates. They can get the entire domain in trouble, and the police, or the search engines in this case, may not care that you are innocent.

Ask your provider if there have been any problems with search engines visiting free web pages. They should know if there are complaints, and they should also be able to help resolve any problems. They have the ability to direct large numbers of people toward the search engines, so it's to the advantage of the search engines to work with the providers.

If it's crucial to be indexed, you may want to consider leaving the free web space and going with a commercial hosting service.

In other words, get your own domain name. It has never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever been a good idea from a search marketing perspective to make use of someone else's domain name, as you are not in control of your own destiny.

I don't care whether it is Blogger, MSN Spaces, Yahoo 360, Typepad, WordPress or anyone. If you make use of someone else's domain name, you are ultimately leaving yourself open to:

  • Bad "neighbors" also sharing the domain name causing you trouble with search engines
  • Your domain name landlord down the line potentially taking away the house where you live

Don't trust me? Don't trust this fundamental bit of advice that I and other search marketers have been saying for years, to have your own domain name? Then usability expert Jacob Nielsen just said the same thing today in Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. Tip number 10 is not to use a domain name owned by another service. He talks about the controlling your own destiny issue, as well as being seen as an amateur and problems in moving over to your own domain name down the line.

Splogs & Searching Issues

How about the searcher side of things? Tara Calishain found Google and Feedster most impacted by splog, Technorati seeming more resistant (probably in part, I suspect, because it actually spiders pages rather than relies on feeds) and Yahoo getting by primarily because of the limited feeds it covers.

Russell Beattie, like Chris Pirillo, found his PubSub feeds getting washed out with spam. I thought the comments below his post were especially interesting, looking at fighting back on the Google AdSense front. It's an issue that's come up before. Not only does Google host a bunch of this junk content, but it also helps fuel it by people earning through AdSense.

Ranking By Time Magnifies Spam

Back to Mark Cuban, his post highlights one of the key issues that blog search faces. Time ranking magnifies the spam problem.

The major search engines have plenty of spam in their indexes. You simply don't see this as much because searches are sorted by relevancy. What are deemed the best pages across the entire web? Links are used to help calculate this, but textual data on the page and in the links, along with many other factors also come into play.

In contrast, blog search is largely ranked by time. Post something, send it out in your feed, and boom -- you're at the top of the list! That is, until someone else posts and pushes you back down.

How About Some Authority Mixed In?

Solution? How about ranking by time and also limiting matches to only quality blogs. Ah, but you see, that's what PubSub supposed to be able to do. When you create a feed over there, you can use the Filtering By LinkRank feature limit to the top 1 percent, 2 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent or 25 percent of blogs (or technically, feeds).

I've played with it a bit, and haven't been impressed. I got a feed for [google] and know I've limited it past the default (PubSub unfortunately doesn't show your setting after a feed is made). Nevertheless, most of the current matches right now are all coming from one site simply because the word "google" appears in the "Ads By Google" links it carries.

Still, the idea is good, so perhaps it will improve at PubSub or another service (Om Malik's saying forthcoming Sphere will do this. Cool if so, but I haven't played with it yet, and we'll all see).

News Search Is Great Because They Limit Sources

Over at Robert Scoble, his The race to time-based and blog search post last week touches on exactly the problem of mixing time and relevancy together. His view is that search engines in general suck on the time-based aspect:

Let's look at Yahoo, Google, and MSN first so you can see just how bad those three are if you want to find something that was added to the Web yesterday.

We have a great case study. Yesterday Microsoft and Real settled their anti-trust case and announced a new partnership. It was written about on hundreds of blogs and hundreds of ?pro? news sources.

We also have today?s Apple announcements. So, let?s search on both of those...

Robert goes on to be unimpressed at finding new stuff. But the reality is that search engines are great at finding new stuff. That's called news search. And news search is great because the sources are limited. Not everyone get in. It may be that for blog search to be great, you have to have that same time of limitation. More on this in my response to Robert's post, which I've reprinted below:

Let's qualify. You mean how bad they are if you only look at the web search results and ignore the onebox/shortcut displays they have.

In other words, do [video ipod] on Google or Yahoo, and at the top of the pages, they show you plenty of news results. They aren?t behind in gathering fresh data. They?re simply segregating it into the news area and giving you a heads-up that it is there.

You?re either missing it or ignoring it because those top of the page segments don?t feel ?normal? to you. All I can say is that the search engines are aware of that issue.

If you look at my Invisible Tabs article it talks about how at some point, the search engines need to automatically push the right button or tab or link for you, to give you 10 news results for queries that obviously are news related. Or you do a shopping search and you get all shopping results automatically.

The problem is the search engines are frightened about making such a change. If they get it wrong, they may lose people. So they are slowly letting vertical listings creep in this way.

Remember, web search is NOT a time based activity. Honestly. Think about it. The last time you did a web search for something new, you weren?t looking for the best overall site on the subject, were you? No, you wanted the latest, timely information. You wanted news. They give you excellent news through news search engines. And Yahoo, among the majors, as you know just started incorporating blogs as a news source, as well.

Overall, Robert, I think the posts you are doing on search are great in raising the issues out there and helping push for further UI changes that need to happen. But I think it would also help to point out some of the features that do exactly what you want, when they exist. IE ? everyone, you want timely info? news.google.com, news.yahoo.com are great places to go.

As for your blog search problem, yeah, I know that well. It?s why I don?t depend on blog search much. I get timely, but I also get all the crud. PubSub tries to solve this by picking the most authoritative blogs, but I haven?t found that?s really solved the problem much.

Ultimately, it will probably come down to blog search further refining this, letting you search by default against a set of hand selected or some other method filtered blogs, to cut out all the spam ? and you can go further across all the blogs if you want. But when there are simply so many blogs out there, a good chunk of them splogs and so on, you?ve got to have some filtering. THAT?s why news search works so well, because the vertical sites allowed in there are reviewed.

FYI, Technorati's out with some handy fresh numbers, finding that two to eight person of new blogs are spam but notes this weekend's problems may have been perceived as worse simply because spam is targeting the names of people. Bloggers are big ego searchers, so if someone targets your name, blog spam can see worse.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:22 PM | Permalink

October 13, 2005

Bloglines Announces Enhancements To Service

Mark Fletcher (a very nice guy by the way) and his Bloglines team are announcing several new enchancements to the Bloglines web-based news aggregator this afternoon and we've got a quick peek. Expect more on the AJ Blog (or is the Ask.com Blog?) shortly.

Keyboard Hotkeys

  • New keyboard shortcuts (aka Hotkeys) Don't like the mouse? Can you navigate more quickly (how about less scrolling?) with the keyboard? Then these might be of use. You'll find a link to what Hotkeys are available at the bottom of each feed. I've also posted a screen cap here.

  • Colons Coming: Unread vs. Keep As New Note: When I tested this new feature it appeared not to be live yet. There's a difference between "Unread" articles and those marked "Keep as New" (subtle, but distinct), so you will now see two numbers next to your subscribed feeds in parentheses. The number to the left of the colon represents the articles you have not read/seen before, and the number on the right represents the articles you have manually kept new.

Mobile Bloglines I've said before (including another mention today) how much I like Bloglines Mobile. So, what's new?

  • Embedded Media Access to enclosure links in blog articles, allowing you to view images or listen to your favorite podcasts from your mobile device. I'm assuming you're going to need a mobile MP3 player like Pocket Tunes, Real, MS Player, etc.) to access podcasts. Regardless, great idea and a true time saver.

  • You can now use the "Keep as New" option for articles you have previously read, allowing you to scroll through as many articles as you want and come back to them later.

The Universal Inbox Keeps Growing

  • The Bloglines Universal Inbox initiative grew today with new types of information becoming available via the service. Today, accecss to horoscopes and winning lottery numbers (they might go well together (-;) were added. Other Universal Inbox data includes package tracking data and local weather info.

Postscript: The AJ Blog has been updated with news of these new features.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:22 PM | Permalink

October 7, 2005

News.com Gets Top 100 Blog List

News.com has a new Blog 100 list, including a search and media blogs category. There's no page for that category I can point you at, but Threadwatch made the list, and you can see the write-up here (congrats, Nick!). From there, you can see other search blogs. Well, you can see the only other search blog on the list, John Battelle's Searchblog (congrats, John!), written up here.

Despite News.com often citing our Search Engine Watch Blog, we suck and don't make the list. In reaction, we're going all Googly and not speaking to News.com until June 2006 unless added to the list. Just joking! (and the two are talking again, anyway).

Think we ought to be on the list? Hey, help us out and drop a polite word to News.com here. Pretty please, with sugar on top? If not for me, how about Gary? He works so hard, and he always gets down if we don't make lists like this.

You might also mention adding Barry's Search Engine Roundtable or Google Blogoscoped, among others. Other search blogs? Surely there can't be more! Absolutely, and a good starting place is our blog roll of search blogs. We even list News.com :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:37 AM | Permalink

October 5, 2005

Calishain and Her Kebberfegg

Our friend and fellow Web Search University faculty member, Tara Calishain, has release yet another new RSS tool named Kebberfegg (Keyword Based RSS Feed Generator) (now that's a name for you) that makes it quick and easy to create and then receive keyword-based RSS alerts from numerous sources. At the moment, over three dozen feeds are available.

Using Kebberfegg is easy.

  • First, enter your keyword strategy into the search box.
  • For this demo, I'll use the query "multimedia search."
  • Then, I select a category or categories of feed sources I would be interested in receiving.
  • I decided to select the following categories: Web Search Engines, Technology, Press Releases, and Multimedia.
  • You can choose the output as a plain ol' RSS link on an HTML or OPML, that you can import into a feed reader
  • OK, I chose the HTML option and now have a page of direct RSS links (preconfigured for my "multimedia search" query, ready to add to my aggregator.
  • You'll see an RSS button or a second button to add the feed directly to My Yahoo.

Where are the feeds coming from? Lot's of places. My Kebberfegg results pages included feeds from PR Newswire, Ice Rocket, and Blogdigger Audio Search.

Finally, Tara welcomes suggests for sources that offer keyword based feeds. In fact, I suggested a few early this morning and she's already added them.

Postscript: Tara, how about adding a direct link (link you do with My Yahoo) to add feeds to Bloglines?

Posted by Gary Price at 12:59 PM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

Yahoo Blog/Feed Search Coming

We had an unplanned glimpse of Yahoo's blog search in July, and now it looks like the service is going to formally emerge. Spotted via Steve Rubel, BusinessWeek cites Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz saying it might come as early as this week (or next week, depending on what you consider "next week" to be). Of course, Yahoo began offering blog search at Yahoo Korea back in August. Read Korean? Check out the service here. FYI, the glimpse of Yahoo "blog search" we had before was really for feed search. And Google's "blog search" is more accurately called Google Feed Search, as I explained here. Blogs aren't the same as feeds; feeds aren't the same as blogs!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:06 PM | Permalink

September 30, 2005

Feedster Plans Self-Serve RSS Ad Program

According to a Media Daily News article: Feedster to Release New RSS Ad Product, placing advertising in Feedster RSS feeds will become even easier in the next few weeks when the RSS search tool launches a new, "self-service" program (aka AdSense like) as compared to the RSS ad program Feedster currently provides.

The Media Daily News also reports that Feedster will release a "feed-profiling tool" later this year.

The product, Redlitz said, will profile a blogger's feeds using Feedster's index--and will deliver ads based on the overall content of the feed over time, not individual posts. For example, a blogger who writes about politics 80 percent of the time would still receive politically relevant ads the other 20 percent of the time when he blogs about, say, his cat.

Just a thought. For many RSS users the lack of advertising, to this point, is a reason I frequently hear as one of the reasons they like it so much. I wonder if increased advertising, any advertising for that matter, will stop current users from using RSS and slow its growth and acceptance with people who haven't tried it.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:23 AM | Permalink

September 27, 2005

Dynamically Search and Browse RSS News Headlines

Last week I authored a SearchDay article about Surfwax making their dynamic search navigation technology, LookAhead, available to any webmaster to license and use on their site(s). LookAhead can potentially help the searcher focus a news or RSS search with very little effort before clicking the search button. In other words, dynamic search navigation can save search time and provide them with better results with very little effort.

Now, Surfwax, the providers of LookAhead are offering a free RSS search tool that demonstrates the technology. Here’s how it works.

+ Go to http://lookahead.surfwax.com/rss-index.html and begin entering terms hat might be of interest to you. + As you enter terms, the TITLES of potentially useful posts will begin appearing in a box directly below the search box. The list also contains the source of the post and the time it was posted. + Now, click the title/headline and you?ll be taken DIRECTLY to the article or blog post. That's right, now search results page to review. + Remember, your search terms are ?rotated,? so you?ll see useful headlines regardless of what order you enter your search terms.

Users are encouraged to suggest feeds for the service to crawl. We?ve also learned that a larger index will be released very soon.

Here?s a list of just a few other services that provide similar types of services:

+ WikiWax from Surfwax + News Accumulator from Surfwax + Snap Suggest from Snap.com + Pinpoint Shopping from AOL + Google Suggest

Posted by Gary Price at 4:51 PM | Permalink

September 26, 2005

Blog Buzz News: PubSub Improvements Coming, BuzzMetrics Sold

PubSub to Measure Blog Influence by Category from ClickZ says that PubSub is supposed to release a new version of its LinkRanks service, to help you find key blogs in various topics. Watching to see what comes up. No news yet on the PubSub blog. Top of my list is a hope that PubSub goes back and measures links from actual blog posts rather than just feeds, because of the problems with this I covered before. Meanwhile, BuzzMetrics Bought By Israel-Based Trendum covers word-of-mouth firm BuzzMetrics being bought by Trendum.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:00 AM | Permalink

September 22, 2005

Findory Completes Release of Personalized RSS Reader

In August, Findory's Greg Linden blogged that an "early" version of Findory's personalized RSS reader was available. Yesterday, Greg said that the release is now complete. You can access the service here.

Key Features:

  • Import your Bloglines subscriptions by entering your login
  • Import a users public Bloglines subscriptions
  • Import subscriptions via other readers and services via OPML
  • Related and personalized articles for every feed that you're subscribed to
  • Personalization: "My Top Stories" page reveals articles from your favorite feeds picked based on the articles you read in the past

Well, I'm off to spend some time with the reader. So far, I've had no trouble importing my Bloglines feeds into Findory. Greg offers a bit more about the service here. Note to Greg: How about a mobile version Findory's RSS reader? The "My Top Stories" feature (aka personalized selections) would be great to have when I want to check "what's happening" while I'm on the go and time is at a premium.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:27 PM | Permalink

September 20, 2005

Feedster CTO Comments on Splogs (Spam Blogs)

Scott Johnson, CTO at Feedster, has written a commentary for Media Post about splogs (spam blogs) and what the industry must do to combat them. The commentary is titled, The Newest Front in the Online Wars: Splogs.

A splog is a spam blog--that is, a fake blog that is created for the sole purpose of getting a high search engine "page rank" to reap profits through ad clicks, or to drive customers to an otherwise obscure e-commerce site... To give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem, in the United Kingdom there is a company with over 15,000 spam blogs at last count. There were well over 10,000 spam blogs on BlogSpot alone related to the Triple Crown horse races. Of course, each time a visitor clicks on a paid search term, the advertiser pays for it and the "splogger" gets a revenue share... Blog search companies must maintain an aggressive stance on blog spam, and continue to hone their tools and techniques.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:50 AM | Permalink

September 14, 2005

Thoughts On & Poking At Google Blog Search

Chris covered the launch of Google's new blog search in today's SearchDay article, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search. In this post, I want to add some of my own thoughts. I'll also be working up a rundown on reaction from others, and Gary may be adding his own thoughts as a postscript here or as a separate post. Top line thoughts? It's not spam free. I wish it were "full text" blog search to better represent the blog world. It's got a short memory, not going back past March 2005. But the backlink info looks good, certainly better than you'll get on Google itself.

  • Chris mentioned this in his article, but I think it's worth stressing, technically, this is FEED SEARCH. You are only searching through any feed that Google has found. Some blogs don't have feeds. Some feeds don't come from blogs. Google understands these issues and figures down the line, it may have to revisit changes to make it truly a blog search, if that's what's intended.  
  • By default, sorting is by RELEVANCE, not DATE. If you are looking for the latest posts on a particular topic, use the "Sort by date" link in the upper right-hand corner. Unfortunately, you can't save this as a preference. However...  
  • As Chris noted, you can have results constantly sent to you via a feed alert. The feed links are at the bottom of each page. So if you wanted to know the latest blogs mentioning Google, you'd search for that word, sort by date, then subscribe.  
  • Want to know the latest backlinks to your blog? Use the link: command, such as link:blog.searchenginewatch.com, sort by date, then subscribe to a feed of that search. That shows all links to your domain, to any page anywhere on your blog and will send you the newest ones.  
  • Want to know the latest backlinks to a particular post? Use the full page address, such as link:blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050831-091033. That brings back matches linking just to that page.  
  • Don't want to learn these commands? Just type in a full URL, with or without the http:// prefix into the Blogger version of Google Blog Search. It will automatically do the right thing there and show backlinks.  
  • As Chris notes, Google says that for blog search backlinks, it's not suppressing any of the links it knows about. To spell that out, here are some figures to contemplate:  

    Notice, a search across the ENTIRE web on Google brings back fewer backlinks than across the much more limited feed database on Google. Why? The third line shows the answer. A search on the ENTIRE web on MSN Search web search brings back more results as well, despite MSN supposedly having a slightly (very slightly) smaller database of pages based on self-reported figures. Google simply doesn't report all the backlinks it knows about for web search, something it has said time and again when pressed on the issue, a fact well know to many experienced search marketers.  

  • It's not FULL TEXT blog search. Huh? If you post to a blog, you might not send out the entire text of your post in a feed. We don't, for instance. Our reason is that we don't want everyone assuming they can reprint our material. Jason Calacanis of Weblogs has written of similar issues despite copyright warnings in his full-text feed. But Google's only currently searching what's in the feed, meaning that it actually may be ignorant of a huge amount of blog content that's not pushed in a feed. That produces some skewing, as I found with PubSub back in June. Ideally, I'd like to see Google do what Technorati does and grab the actual full-text of the post, rather than depend just on the feed. For its part, Google says this is something it's pondering.  
  • The site: command is said to work, but I didn't find that the case. site:scripting.com came back with no matches, for example. But the new blogurl:scripting.com seems to do the trick. However, compare that to site:scripting.com on Google web search. Blog search gets about 414 matches, while web search of that blog brings back 344,000 matches. It's a huge difference and show the greater blog coverage Google web search actually gives. The advanced search page highlights the issue. You'll see that the earliest date you can search back to is March 1, 2005. In other words, the feed database has a much shorter history range than the web database, something that full text indexing would solve -- though you'd lose the ability to more accurate do things like author and date range searching if you're taking scraped data, rather than delimited data in a feed.  
  • Spam clearly hasn't been eliminated. A search for google blog search brings up a series of "Related Blogs" that are all spammy in nature to me. However, the main results below look fairly clean. But for a query on google, spam is back with a vengeance. The first result (on Google's Blogger service) tells me:

Resources To Acquire Stanley Power Tool Or Draper Power Tool On The Internet Get your stanley power tool on the world wide web. The first thing I thought of is how easy it is to get stanley power tool online. Google has listings for many stanley power tool sites. There are lots of stanley power tool that will help you.

In fact, the first four results when sorted by date are all similar in terms of spammy, nonsensical copy. Doorway page spam on Google -- it is 1999!

What we need is either better spam filtering or some type of super "sort by date and relevancy" feature. PubSub's got a feature that's sort of like this, but when I last looked, I still found spam and irrelevant content getting though.

  • Freshness or comprehensiveness seems an issue. For that query on google, I get the latest post as being 40 minutes ago, with the one after that an hour ago, then the next one two hours ago. That's it? Over the past two hours, there's only been three blog posts about Google? While I don't want all those poor selections where just anything mentioning Google may come up, I also want to see the latest. What we need is either better spam filtering or some type of super "sort by date and relevancy" feature. PubSub's got a feature that's sort of like this, but when I last looked, I still found spam and irrelevant content getting though.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Google Blog Search Launched.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:19 AM | Permalink

September 13, 2005

More On Memeorandum

Further to my earlier post on the new Memeorandum blog and news service, I heard back from creator Gabe Rivera on whether keyword search would be coming, more about how sources are added and dropped and what other vertical topics may be coming. Below are the questions I sent and the email responses that came back.

Why no keyword search?

The shortest answer: focus and limited resources.

This was designed to highlight buzzworthy stuff. The assumption when I built this was that between Google News and Technorati/Bloglines, search of the "Live Web" is covered. Or at least very hard to surpass.

Still, it has occurred to me: the particular strengths of my system may be relevant to search. But getting from here to there will require very profound system architectural changes. It would be a big deal to accomplish.

I do plan to add a simple "powered by Google" search for the published stuff, but I'm assuming you're talking about searching the underlying data.

[NOTE: Yep, I was. For me, the main thing search would offer is the ability to create new vertical results outside of Tech and Politics but still get the Google-like clustering that's compelling]

Will keyword search be coming?

It's not planned, and if I change my mind, it will take, let's say, "many months".

Have you thought of publishing an entire source list? Is there any way for a site to determine if it's been selected as a source?

Here's something funny about the source list: it's not fixed. It changes constantly. If you and John Battelle start linking to a hot new search-focused blog, that blog will be added as a source, automatically.

And it may just as well be dropped later, automatically. So I don't have plans to publish a list.

Of course since there is no keyword search, there is less at stake in being "included". E.g., on Google News, even if you're never on the front page, if you're "included", you show up in search results. On my site, if you don't appear on the front page, there's no other advantage to being "included".

What are the next planned verticals, and when will they come out?

I'm really not sure when or what. Sports? Medicine? Gadgets?

Entertainment? Gossip? I don't know mainly because it takes some experimentation to see if a vertical will work. But I do plan to add more.

Many another one or two later this year? We'll see!

Gabe also said:

The unifying theme to all of my answers: this is a one-person operation, with no backing, pursing highly experimental ideas. So I'm unable to crank out a ton of technology, and I'm kind of making up the plan as I go along.

And on my saying the name was hard to spell correctly

Hah! Sometimes bloggers tell me the name "memeorandum" is good. I disagree with them and agree with you.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:10 AM | Permalink

New Memeorandum Great Blend Of Top Blog & News Material

New site Memeorandum provides a Google News-like clustering of news stories and blog commentary on various topics. So far, it looks pretty clean and nice to me, well worth anyone checking out.

Interested in politics? Then see the site's home page, as that's where political news and commentary is assembled. After tech news? See the tech section. Additional sections are promised to come.

Where's the content coming from? Creator Gabe Rivera explains more about the service here on the site's blog and how it's designed to tap into authoritative commentators and stories in various areas. However, that post and the site itself is sparse on details of the mechanics.

Fortunately, Robert Scoble has more info in his review here, having viewed the site in testing apparently for several months. The service uses a white list of tech and political blogs and then builds out inclusion of other sources based on what they link to. That can include other blogs or more traditional news sources.

Spotted via Dave Winer, Richard MacManus has another review here, highlighting more of how things work. In short, the more links to a post, the bigger the post headline will be.

Huh? To understand more, here's a look at what's on the tech home page right now. It's topped by a story from BusinessWeek on "Why eBay Is Buying Skype." That's the biggest link, and then there are "Related Items" below it, other stories from blogs or traditional news sources. Each story also has a "Discussion" line, which links to blog that may be commenting on the item.

Below the eBay item are other items, such as the launch of Memeorandum itself, a the trademark dispute over Gmail, the Game Boy Micro and so on. Each item may have further related items and discussion.

It's a compelling blend. For me, "blog" search has really meant largely commentary search. Many blogs comment on news, and many have been frustrated by existing tools making it hard to get the good commentary when you want it. But some blogs also report news, so excluding them from a "news search" has meant that you might miss news until it hits more mainstream sources. Memeorandum ties the two together nicely, especially managing that tricky switch of knowing when a blog is reporting "news" rather than commenting.

Look in the right-hand column, and you can see that you can subscribe to an RSS feed and get updated with new material, which apparently flows in every five minutes. The feed isn't as nice as the home page, in that the clustering doesn't happen, nor do you appear to get related discussion links for an item. But if you want to get a regular dose of most-linked-to stories, it's a nice solution.

Robert wrote that the service has done a great job eliminating noise and spam in the months he's used it. I've also found those to be a plague when I've tried blog search as places like Technorati or PubSub. My limited look so far gives a thumbs up on these fronts to Memeorandum.

On the downside, there's no keyword search facility that I can see. I want that, and soon! And be careful of the name. It's a play on meme + memorandium and probably a bad choice in that many will likely misspell. Heck, Robert did in the title of his post about the service. Use an E, not an O.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Postscript: See More On Memeorandum with comments from creator Gabe Rivera on whether keyword search would be coming, more about how sources are added and dropped and what other vertical topics may be coming.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:47 AM | Permalink

September 12, 2005

Scott Rafer Says Goodbye To Feedster

In a blog post titled, Becoming a Feedster Alum, Scott Rafer announces that he has has left his position as the person in charge at Feedster. Rafer says he will be helping Feedster's board find a new chairman while also working on several new projects in the coming months. Scott also points out that he is now the chairman at Wireless Ink, the parent of WINKsite, a mobile blog service and community service. WINKsite makes it easy to create a mobile-ready version of your blog (or any blog) with just a few clicks. We wish Scott all the best.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:15 AM | Permalink

September 7, 2005

The Wall Street Journal Tackles Blog Search

Last week, Chris published an excellent roundup of weblog/rss search tools in SearchDay. Today, it's the Wall Street Journals turn to dive into the weblog/rss search business with the article: New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs.

Engines featured include: + Technorati + Ice Rocket + Blogpulse + DayPop + Bloglines

Three other engines that I use, Blogdigger, Waypath, and blog search from Findory are not mentioned in the article. I also use PubSub (not mentioned in WSJ) and while it's not a search engine like the others, this "matching engine" does a good job (and getting better) of keeping me up to date with new postings of interest. A real timesaver.

One other point. Some of these engines offer access to much more than weblog content because they index feeds from various sources that don't come from blogs. Btw, what is a blog? Do all blogs have feeds? Are all feeds from blogs?. I'll readily admit that calling them "RSS Engines" is not a good idea since so few people know what RSS is. However, I think it's time to come up with a better name. "Current Awareness Engines" comes to mind but that might also be to complex for some. I think users also appreciate some guidance between what a news engine offers vs. what they'll find from a blog engine since many news sources also provide feeds. I would also appreciate if these tools offer some guidance about what content they index and what content they don't.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:28 PM | Permalink

Japan's Mitsui Invests in Feedster

A news release sent to SEW Blog alerts us to the fact that Feedster from Japan's, Mitsui and Co has made an investment in Feedster. What's the size of the investment? The number was not disclosed. Feedster will use the money to expand their business worldwide.

In June, we blogged about Feedster closing a round of venture cap funding. Last December we mentioned the Omidyar Network making an investment in the company.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:21 PM | Permalink

September 6, 2005

Revisiting Technorati's Blog Finder & Listing Issues

Gary Price wrote earlier of Technorati's new Technorati Blog Finder, along with some issues with the new beta service. For our Search Engine Watch members, the Revisiting Technorati's Blog Finder & Listing Issues article I've now posted take a longer look at the new service, how it operates and ways blog owners can consider improving their performance within it. In summary, the article covers:

  • How the service provides a new way for those seeking blogs about particular topics -- rather than blog posts -- to locate them.  
  • A step-by-step look at how site owners can set their tags to anything they want, which directly impacts which tag categories they show up in.  
  • Strategies on how to select the best 20 tags for your blog.  
  • How "searches" on Blog Finder only bring up tags specifically matched with those words -- and how you remain essentially invisible for anything you haven't specifically tagged your blog for.  
  • How sites are listed by Technorati rank, derived from looking at all the links on the home pages of blogs that point at your blog.  
  • How the tagging system brings back the "bad old days" of the meta keywords tag, where you have to include singular, plural, stemmed and alternative terms. IE, want to show up for things related to blogging? You'd need to tag yourself blog, blogs, blogging and blogger!  
  • How anyone can claim any blog at the moment to tag it however they like, even if they don't verify ownership. Don't panic, in that they don't seem to be able to overwrite any settings done on a blog you've claim. Rather, they can set up a parallel claim and put you in categories/tags they want.  
  • How searches currently don't match titles and descriptions of tags, meaning that you can't find them by name -- but this is something Technorati says it will fix in the future. "We wanted to provide the most value up-front as the first product feature but we are certainly not finished with the product and take our beta badges seriously," said Technorati community manager Niall Kennedy.  
  • How stemming and other consolidation may come in the future, so that people don't have to think of every related variation of a topic.  
  • How a bug last Friday that seemed to prevent changes from being saved has been cleared up.  
  • How relevancy issues remain, in that people can deliberately misassign their blogs or accidentally get categories in areas they really aren't relevant for.

As a blog owner, should you even care about Technorati? After all, it's taken mounting criticisms over performance issues, as many are aware. Despite this, the service remains popular and something that many in the blog world care about. It's easy to improve your listings in the new service at the moment and worth a few minutes to do so.

As someone seeking blogs, the new finder service helps Technorati counter some criticism its taken over its Top 100 list. The plus to the Technorati system is that it allows, as it says, for people to make mini Top 100 lists in any particular topic.

That's what someone like Robert Scoble wants, but the tagging system it's based on leaves all types of issues. My article for members, as Gary's previous review of Blog Finder, shows the problems you get with having to think of plural and stemming terms, not to mention alternative terms (search marketing or search engine marketing -- you've gotta do both). Josh Hallett covers some further criticisms as well here, plus points to a variety of other observations worth checking out.

Still want more top blog lists? There's the Feedster Top 500 list that came up recently and there's the existing Bloglines list.

Also be sure to check out Yahoo's blog & feed finding service. I feel it's poorly known, in particular because Yahoo needs to do a much better job in making it visible.

My past Yahoo Feed Search & Web Search Feeds Update post explains the service more and the Submitting To Yahoo's Feed Search post looks at webmaster issues plus touches on how it provides the type of mini-Top 100 lists that some want.

If you're a SEW member, a longer version with many more details on the submitting side is here.

Want to discuss Blog Finder? Please visit our Search Engine Watch Forums and start a thread!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:56 AM | Permalink

September 2, 2005

Technorati Launches Technorati Blog Finder

Technorati has just launched the Technorati Blog Finder, a beta service, that is supposed to help users find blogs by subject. How does it work? The Technorati blog points out that the "Finder" is based on the tags that blog authors have assigned to posts on their blog. An algorithm looks at the tags and then auto assigns it into various categories. The directory currently contains about 500,000 blogs.

By default, the blogs are presented in order of authority, which means highly-linked blogs appear first. So each of these Blog Finder pages is like a mini Top 100 for any topic you can imagine. You can also sort each tag by how recently the blogs have updated, or alphabetical by title.

Registered Technorati users also have the option to go their configure blog page and actually decide what tags you want to assign to your blog. In other words, you can determine the categories where your blog will be found. You can also do it by associating tags with a link to Technorati, as described here.

How well does it work? First, it was very very slow to load. I gave up several times.

Second, directories should save the user time and effort in helping them pinpoint relevant material. I'm not sure (yes, I know it's a beta) that Technorati Blog Finder does the job very well.

I browsed various categories and found blog after blog that had little to do with the category or "tag" it was assigned to. For example, is David Sifry's blog really about California? Well, since he assigned California as a tag I guess it is. Would "Sifry Alerts" meet the needs of the typical user looking for blogs about California to be ranked so highly? I don't think so.

What's the first blog in the Google category (sorted by authority)? If..Else Log. Huh? I found only 10 mentions of Google in the history of the site but since the author (or perhaps Technorati itself) assigned Google as a tag, I guess its "about" Google.

I wanted to find blogs "about" Chicago (my hometown) and found "Check Raise" listed at number one. This blog is by someone who lives in Chicago but really doesn't focus on Chicago related issues, locations, etc. At number 2 on the list is "Junto Boyz". Again, this blog has nothing to do with the city. In fact, this blog is about search more than anything else.

Finally, I wanted to find blogs about "weather" and "hurricanes" (you can combine tags) and didn't find anything.

I also tried hurricanes by and found "The Weather Blog" listed twice at number five on the authority ranking. I also wonder how authoritative it could be since it was last updated 49 days ago and has 0 links inbound or outbound links. At number seven is a blog about UK rugby and a team named the Hurricanes. Yes, a term can have multiple meanings. Of course, this blog also has 0 inbound links and hasn't been updated in four months.

By the way, pluralization or stemming is also an issue. You should get the same results when looking for blogs about hurricane or hurricanes but Technorati Blog Finder produces different results. No, I didn't even find a cross-reference.

For Technorati Blog Finder to become a valuable tool to find blogs by subject, Technorati is going to need to do deeper analysis of a blog's actual text (over an extended period of time) and rely less on tags. Right now, I'll have to pass on this one.

Danny's poked at the service a bit as well, finding that so far, it only seems to retrieve matches based on tags. So try to find a blog by its title or description, and that doesn't work. Danny's sent some follow-up questions to Technorati and plans to look again at the service on Monday.

Postscript: Niall Kennedy, Technorati's community manager, sends this feedback on issues:

The Technorati Blog Finder will improve as users purposely add tags to their blogs for increased relevance and discovery. Users will browse a page, identify with the subject, and make a choice to participate. I expect a much better experience as we receive more user-generated data in the coming weeks.

Yes, a single tag can have multiple meanings. We have seen special post tags created to get around this issue for specific topics. A tag of "LocalChicago" might be a bottom-up way of describing blogs writing about the city of Chicago for example.

The double listing of The Weather Blog is a mistake and has been corrected on our backend (it may take a little while for the front end cache to display the change). The Weather Blog is hosted on TypePad which uses a URL structure of username.typepad.com/blogname and most users simply use username.typepad.com as their blog identity and default blog homepage. We received blog submissions for both locations of The Weather Blog and we have now corrected the listings to only search for updates on the blog homepage.

Also, Danny's follow-up article can be found here: Revisiting Technorati's Blog Finder & Listing Issues.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:43 PM | Permalink

September 1, 2005

Which RSS Feed Reader?

I'm wrapping up my series of articles on RSS today, focusing on the tools available to keep track of your favorite RSS feeds. RSS readers (or aggregators or news readers) are plentiful, and have a wide variety of features. Today's SearchDay article, Choosing an RSS Reader offers tips on selecting one that best meets your needs, with reviews of some of the more popular and useful RSS readers available.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 4:16 AM | Permalink

August 31, 2005

Searching for Relevant RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are becoming ubiquitous, though ironically good content isn't always easy to find. None of he major search engines have yet to launch a major RSS search application. There are specialized RSS search services available, however, and part two of our in-depth look at RSS describes them. For more, see today's SearchDay article, RSS Search Engines.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:50 AM | Permalink

August 30, 2005

RSS, Blogs and Feeds Week

This week, SearchDay is focused on RSS, blogs and feeds. In today's SearchDay article, What is RSS, and Why Should You Care?, I attempt to get my arms around a definition of RSS. Even though one version of the acronym stands for "really simple syndication," for many people, RSS is anything but simple. Today's article covers what RSS is and isn't, and why it's important for both searchers and search marketers. Tomorrow I'll look closely at RSS search tools and how they work. Thursday will be dedicated to RSS readers, the software that makes it easy to find, subscribe to and read information published in RSS format.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:10 AM | Permalink

August 29, 2005

PubSub Kicks Off Football Season With New Service

The 2005 National Football League season is about to begin and the PubSub team has launched another compilation of pre-built prospective searches (simply add to your aggregator). This time queries are available for every NFL team and for many players. PubSub Football is available here. PubSub also offers pre-built searches for baseball teams/players and many U.S. Federal and state government officials. Pre-built queries allow users to harness the power of professionally constructed searches while saving the user time and effort (a good thing). In other words, let PubSub do the heavy lifting so the user can be up and running in a matter of seconds.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:49 PM | Permalink

A Better Tool for Searching the Blogosphere

As popular as blogs are today, none of the major search engines offer a comprehensive way to search the blogosphere. That's going to change—and soon—but for now we're forced to rely on smaller players who are strapped for resources, and can't keep pace with either the volume of new content or the spammers wreaking havoc in blogspace. Fortunately, there's a solution, and Gary Price tells you about it in today's SearchDay article, Metasearch The Blogosphere With Clusty.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 4:21 AM | Permalink

August 24, 2005

Automatically Classifying the Mood of Blog Posts

Here's one for your reading list.

Hardly a week goes by that we don't read about new services that use blogs and the blogosphere to help measure what people are talking about (ie. buzz). Today, I came across a new paper by Gilad Mishne, a grad student at the University of Amsterdam. It reports on exploratory research to automatically (using machine learning) classify blog text based on the mood of the author.

Title: Experiments with Mood Classification in Blog Posts (PDF; 8 pages)

From the abstract: We present preliminary work on classifying blog text according to the mood reported by its author during the writing. Our data consists of a large collection of blog posts ? online diary entries ? which include an indication of the writer?s mood. We obtain modest, but consistent improvements over a baseline; our results show that further increasing the amount of available training data will lead to an additional increase in accuracy. Additionally, we show that the classification accuracy, although low, is not substantially worse than human performance on the same task. Our main finding is that mood classification is a challenging task using current text analysis methods.

As the author goes on to point out: Mood classification is useful for various applications...[and] can enable new textual access approaches, e.g., filtering search results by mood, identifying communities, clustering, and so on.

If you're interested in blog search and/or mining the blogosphere, this paper is worth a look. It also has an excellent bibliography.

"Experiments with Mood Classification in Blog Posts," was presented at the SIGIR conference earlier this month.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:02 PM | Permalink

August 18, 2005

Cuban Vows to Stomp Out Blog Spam

Mark Cuban is mad that blog spam is causing bad results at Ice Rocket, the blog/web engine he owns. So, Cuban has vowed he's going to do something about it. What? No specifics but they're looking at a variety of options." (-: Cuban has also launched SplogReporter.com, a site where anyone can report spam blogs. To submit a url, you'll need to supply an email address. However, I couldn't find any privacy policy or of what will become of these email addresses listed on the site. Good luck Mark, you're going to need it. Of course, this outcry has also done one something else. What? Free publicity and increased name recognition for Ice Rocket. More in the eWeek article: Blog Search Engine Threatens Ban of Blogger Blogs. Btw, Ice Rocket announced a few weeks ago that they're planning to launch a blog only engine named BlogScour.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:44 PM | Permalink

August 16, 2005

Feedster Launches Top 500 Blog List

Sure to fuel upset among those not listed and joy for those who are, Feedster has launched a new Feedster Top 500 list of what it considers the "most interesting and important blogs."

Well, more accurately, the rankings appear to be heavily based on which blogs get the most links, though over what period links are counted (a day? a week? a month?) and where (only in feeds? only in feeds Feedster sees? links from across the entire web?) isn't said on the list itself.

A press release reveals that some time period is taken into account, though what isn't said. Freshness is also apparently a factor, and "non-blogs" have been dropped. That probably wipes out Slashdot, which I've never consider a blog but which often makes other lists. "Professional news sites" have also been dropped, though plenty of the blogs I see are just as "professional" as news sites but because they were born of being blogs, they get a free ride. Engadget tops the list and is pretty much a "professional news site" in my book.

A quick skim shows that among search-related blogs, John Battelle makes it at 139, the Yahoo Search Blog ranks 197 and Barry Schwartz's Search Engine Roundtable squeaks in at 500. We apparently suck and don't make the list at all.

Then again, perhaps Feedster sucks a bit. I mean check this out. There's Feedster picking up our Atom feed that we don't list on our site but do publish for those who go looking -- and for whatever reason, that feed isn't showing as having entries according to Feedster since late July (it does, matching our regular feed in freshness, actually). Feedster's also picked up another feed we had out in November, published probably accidentally and never put on our site. What it doesn't list is our actual main feed URL, despite me having claimed this. I know Feedster has it in the system, but I suspect they don't count it properly in some way.

Postscript: Via Threadwatch, Feedster's Scott Rafer says on his blog that links are counted over time (I take that to mean all time) but only blogs with actual posts in the last seven days get ranked.

Postscript 2: Gary notes the quality content on entry 191, which looks to exist only to grab search engines through keyword stuffing. From the latest post:

Finding a New York lawyer is a pretty tricky task. The mental attitude of most New York is naturally very aggressive. This requires a New York lawyer to be even more forceful than lawyers in other parts of the country. This stereotype can be seen all over the media, in television shows and movies that show a high powered New York lawyer. While many non-New Yorkers are quick to assume that this stereotype is false, if you were to ask a New York lawyer if there was any truth to it, they would probably say that there was. Despite the fact that a New York lawyer will almost surely be more aggressive than a lawyer from a different city, there are still certain things you will want to look for when searching for a New York lawyer.

The content is topped by Google AdSense ads and has all the feel of the WordPress spam that got booted back in March. But perhaps Feedster's top list has a good feel on the blogosphere, considering the continued rise in blog spam for search ranking purposes.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:42 AM | Permalink

August 15, 2005

Nielsen//NetRatings: 11% of Blog Readers use RSS

The results of a new study out today from Nielsen/NetRatings (PDF) shows that 11% of blog readers use RSS to access headlines and read blog content. I would have thought the number would have been somewhat higher amongst blog readers given the amount of attention RSS gets in the blogosphere. I would also be interested to learn how "blogs" were defined since more and more non-blog sites are now offering RSS feeds.

From the survey:

  • Nearly five percent of blog readers use feed aggregation software and more than six percent use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor RSS feeds from blogs.
  • The majority of respondents to the survey were less familiar with RSS feeds. Among the other respondents, 23 percent understood RSS but did not use it, while 66 percent either did not understand the technology or had never heard of it.

Use of RSS Feeds, June 2005 Survey Response Percent of Respondents I use feed aggregation software to monitor RSS feeds for blogs------4.9% I use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor RSS feeds for blogs----6.4% I?ve heard of RSS and know what it does but don?t use RSS feeds----23.0% I?ve heard of RSS but don?t know what it does----------------------15.7% I?ve never heard of RSS before today-------------------------------50.0%

Last month, a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life project showed that only 9% of those surveyed had a "good idea" of what the term RSS means.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:36 PM | Permalink

August 14, 2005

Early Release of Findory's Personalized RSS Reader Now Online

One of the highlights of SES for me was being able to spend some face-to-face time with Findory's CEO, Greg Linden.

Greg and I have chatted via email but had never met in person. He's not only an interesting and thought provoking person (his thoughts about ease of use are points I think about and almost always agree with every time I do demos to non-search geeks) but Findory and many other small companies and developers continue to do interesting, innovative, and important work in search and information retrieval. I think it's crucial that their innovations get the notice they deserve. Greg has agreed to do an interview for the SEW SearchCast in the very near future.

One of the topics we'll talk about is Findory's just released (beta) web-based and personalized (suggesting articles of possible interest) RSS reader. It's a very early release but Greg says to look for more features (including the ability to add/important any feed) in the next few weeks.

From Greg's blog post: On the left, you'll find favorite feeds with new articles are in bold and suggested other feeds listed below. In the middle, you'll see articles from the feed with recommended and new articles marked. On the right, you can read recommended articles from other feeds, an easy way to discover new news sources and articles.

But, wait, there's more. If you have at least three Favorites, you can see recommended stories from all your feeds combined by clicking "My Top Stories". Perfect for quickly surfacing the most interesting articles from your favorite sources.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:12 PM | Permalink

August 8, 2005

On PubSub's New LinkRanks Service

Erick Schonfeld from Business 2.0 has chatted with PubSub's CEO, Bob Wyman and offers a preview of their soon to be released, new and improved LinkRanks service.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:40 PM | Permalink

July 29, 2005

Comprehensive Blog Comparison Review Offered

Mary Hodder at Nasperization.org has done some very impressive research and put together a great post that offers comparisons of how several of the major weblog/rss engines work. She also has placed much of the material into a very handy chart (PDF). Excellent work Mary! If you decide to do more blog search research, here are some things we'd love to learn more about.

  • Precisely what does each service index and made searchable? Is it just the RSS feed or does a crawler go to the actual blog entry and index the entire post. What, if any, RSS engines provide full text search when an RSS feed is just providing a title and/or snippet?
  • Information about Blogdigger
  • Since it's so easy to create backlinks in the blogosphere, do any of these engines take this fact into account when offering backlink totals? In other words, are links from a "spam blog" or "scraper blog" counted too? Should they be? Since blog engines are becoming a popular ways to measure "buzz" what does each engine offer to make sure that a company isn't creating it's own buzz by creating lots of backlinks.
  • How do each of these services come up with their total blog counts that are posted on their home pages. How accurate are they? How does each service define a blog? This week I've noticed that Blogpulse added more than 50,000 new blogs to their index each day. Wow. This means that in about a month more blogs are being created than there are people living in many major cities. Where are these blogs coming from?

Posted by Gary Price at 10:47 AM | Permalink

July 28, 2005

Feedster to Power RSS Portion of New "My AOL" Service

This morning, AOL is rolling out its new personalized home page service called My AOL. Like most AOL services these days, you don't need to be an AOL subscriber to use it.

The first My AOL feature that's now available allows users to build and maintain a personalized page of RSS/XML feeds. This service is powered by a new partnership between AOL and Feedster, an RSS/XML search engine. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Chris has more about the new service in today's SearchDay article, AOL Offers Personalized Home Page, RSS Feeds.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:01 AM | Permalink

July 27, 2005

Technorati Founder and CEO Chats with BusinessWeek

Technorati's Founder and CEO, David Sifry, chats with BusinessWeek about competition from the "big guys", system architecture, growing pains, advertising, and a new service aimed at "people who need a deeper view of a company or its products."

From the interview:

BusinessWeek: You say you welcome competition from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, should they decide to offer blog search. Why would you welcome such Net heavyweights as rivals?

David Sifry: The larger question is, is it really competition? I look at what Google and Yahoo and other companies in this space are doing, and they're really fantastic at helping you pick out what's the best reference site for something. You go to Google and type in wine, and it will tell you the best places to buy wine. But if you really want to find out what the world's leading wine experts are talking about, Google isn't really built to do that.

Unfortunately, you'll not read about what Technorati is doing to combat the rapidly increasing amount of blog and feed spam out there. Also, no info about what criteria Sifry and crew use to reach the currently posted number of more than 14 million blogs that Technorati claims to be tracking.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:11 PM | Permalink

July 26, 2005

litefeeds: A New RSS/XML Aggregator for the Mobile Web

I said a few weeks ago that Bloglines Mobile is one of my favorite resources when I use my Treo 650. Things change quickly in web world but as of today, Bloglines Mobile remains a favorite. However, I've just learned of litefeeds, a new mobile web RSS/XML service that I'm going to try out. I'll post more about litefeeds after I have some time to use try it out.

Notes:

  • litefeeds requires a small download direct to your Java Phone/SmartPhone, Blackberry, Palm or PocketPC.
  • All configuration (adding,organizing etc) is done online so you never have to type anything on your mobile device.
  • Feeds are cached, compressed, and stripped so that they are mobile optimized. If it's not a full text feed, you can click and then view an optimized version of the actual post.
  • Ability to view Flickr/Buzznet images.
  • Option to clip articles to an "online clipboard" and create a feed of clips.
litefeeds comes from Vancouver-based Webpost.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:38 PM | Permalink

RSS Search & Add Option Now Available For Google Personalized Home Page

In the past few days, Google has unveiled a new "look-and-feel" along with a couple of new features to their personalized homepage including the ability to add RSS feeds to the page.

To make a feed visible on your Google Personalized home page, enter the url into the box located under the "create a section" header. If you don't know a feed's url or want Google Personalized to suggest feeds of possible interest, simply enter a feed's title or subject into the box.

Once a feed appears is added to your Google Personalized home page, only titles/headlines are visible. You'll need to click again to view the full text. It's also possible to change the number of headlines/titles visible (default is three) by clicking the edit button. Up to nine headlines/titles can be viewed on the page.

The Google Personalized Home Page went live in May. Here's Danny's overview article.

Another new Google Personalized feature offers an option to list important bookmarks on your page.

The option to add RSS feeds to Yahoo's My Yahoo service has been available since Fall 2004.

Postscript: I noted above that you could search for RSS content using the new feature, but it's worth stressing this significant change. The ability to search effectively gives Google a rudimentary feed discovery service, as Nathan points out, similar that offered by Yahoo and MSN Search, not to mention Ask Jeeves-owned Bloglines.

Postscript 2 (from Danny): After scratching my head wondering why the darn thing wasn't working for me, I came across Brad Hill's post that the CustomizeGoogle extension sadly is the problem. Sure enough, when I got rid of that, the page worked for me.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:51 AM | Permalink

July 21, 2005

Intelliseek Updates BlogPulse with new Tools, Features

What's the buzz in the blogosphere? Intelliseek's BlogPulse has long provided a rich set of tools to help track trends, popular topics and people among the millions of blogs that have cropped up over the past several years. They've added a number of new features, including a very useful tool that profiles an individual blog, offering in-depth information about the blog that's not readily visible. Today's SearchDay article, Deeper Insight into the Blogosphere has more details.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:56 AM | Permalink

July 20, 2005

It's All in the Name: IceRocket Will Become BlogScour

Looking for more weblog/feed search news? If the answer is yes, here's a link to the News.com article: Mark Cuban to relaunch IceRocket.

According to the story, IceRocket's new name will be BlogScour. No word as to what will happen to the other search services IceRocket offers. At the moment, BlogScour.com shows the IceRocket home page.

What will set BlogScour apart from the other blog/feed engines out there? Here's what the article has to say:

The revised IceRocket is expected to be unique among the other search engines in that every search entry has a thumbnail of the home page of the listing.

I'm not sure (understatement) that just offering a static image of a home page is going to be enough.

The article doesn't mention if BlogScour will implement any new search technology (improved crawl, improved precision, better relevance, personalization, etc.).

Postscript: Nick reports the BlogScour will be a standalone site and that IceRocket will remain online. However, we still don't know if BlogScour will be something different (in terms of technology, crawl, etc.) or just a new standalone version of the blog/feed search that IceRocket already offers?

Posted by Gary Price at 9:02 PM | Permalink

Survey Results Show Most Americans Have No Clue About RSS

A new data brief from the Pew Internet & American Life project titled: The average American internet user is not sure what podcasting is, what an RSS feed does, or what the term “phishing” means, looks at the results of a just completed survey.

The results show only 9% of those surveyed had a "good idea" of what the term RSS means. 65% weren't sure and 26% had never heard of the term.

Only 13% of those surveyed had a "good idea" of what a podcasting is.

Those of us who watch the web, web tools, and web search closely (including myself) often forget that many of the things we talk about all day, everyday (and the services we use) still aren't even close to making it into the vocabulary or onto the desktops of the masses.

As the survey's discussion points out, technology terms and ideas take time to emerge in the mindset of the general public. However, I often wonder if the usefulness that so many leading edge types believe that syndication, feeds, etc. offer are to reach the mainstream, calling it something other than RSS (as see on on many web sites) might be worthy of consideration. Of course, the cynical person in me wonders if the public even cares, will ever care, or really needs to know about RSS and other tools in the first place.

Thanks to SC for the tip.

Postscript: Lee Rainie, Project Director, of the Pew Internet & American Life Project saw my post and sent along a comment. He writes: I think your take on it [the survey] is perfect. It's useful to remember every once in a while that lots of people don't obsessively focus on the things that fire the imagination of bleeding edgers.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:10 PM | Permalink

MSN Updates Start.com Site with New Features

Yesterday, MSN's experimental Start.com customizable homepage received a few updates and bug fixes that you can read about on the Start.com blog.

The most noticeable change comes in the way search results are displayed. Start.com results pages now allow you to quickly move between web results, news results, and RSS results via tab links at the top of the page. RSS results come from feed directory that's powered by Moreover and also used at My MSN.. Also, Start.com now allows you to subscribe to feeds via a link next to each RSS result.

Ok, MSN has a searchable directory of RSS feeds. However, you've got to think that it will be sooner rather than later when MS releases their own fully functioning and standalone RSS engine. We've mentioned that MSN was developing an RSS engine a couple of times on SEW. Once, last November in Chris's original review of MSN Search and again a few weeks later in a blog post by Danny.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:01 PM | Permalink

PubSub Plays Ball with New Feature

The PubSub team released a new feature today that offers pre-built prospective searches to track blogosphere and other syndicated content about Major League Basball teams and players.

By going to PubSub Baseball you can simply click a team or player name and quickly have a professionally built query ready to place into an RSS aggregator or PubSub Sidebar. As the query matches new items from the stream of content entering the PubSub database, you'll be notified almost immediately.

When PubSub released their government info service a few weeks ago, I said that the company was smart to pre-build prospective searches for popular topics. Why? They offer more precise searches while also saving the user time and effort (a good thing). In other words, let PubSub do the heavy lifting so the user can be up and running in a matter of seconds.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:30 AM | Permalink

July 19, 2005

How Many RSS Feeds Really Matter?

Everyday we read estimates of the total number of blogs and feeds out there. Of course, we rarely get solid definitions of just what a blog is. Does every feed belong to a blog? Do blogs or feeds that haven't been updated in x amount of time count? Do all the sites that post totals use the same criteria? I'm sure you've asked these and other questions. Just like total the database sizes that we see from some web engines, total blog and feed numbers are primarily marketing tools.

Jim Lanzone, Senior Vice President of Search Properties at Ask Jeeves, has just posted some interesting numbers and graphs on the Ask.com Blog that reveal the total number of feeds that have at least one subscriber who access the feed with Bloglines.

Lanzone believes this is a more accurate number of the total amount of feeds since someone has taken the time to subscribe to it. He calls these, "feeds that matter."

According to Bloglines members around the world, 1,121,655 feeds ?matter? to date. Note this includes only content feeds tracked, and not topics tracked via ?saved? or ?persistent? searches using the Bloglines service.

Findory's Greg Linden adds an excellent comment to the post saying that a feed might need more than a single to subscriber to really "matter." He thinks 20 subscribers might be a better number to use. I think Greg makes an excellent point. Lanzone promises more breakdowns in the near future. I would also like to see how many of these 1 million plus feeds are updated at least once or twice a month.

I'll add that in some cases Bloglines has more than one feed listed for the same blog. I can speak from experience on this one since Bloglines currently lists seven feeds (one official, others unofficial, several broken) for my ResourceShelf site. All of these feeds have at least one subscriber.

Bottom Line? This post is worthy of your attention and, at the least, helps to provide a more realistic idea about the number of feeds out there.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:58 PM | Permalink

New from Bloglines: Subscription Suggestions and UI Translations

Bloglines has just launched a new service called Quick Pick Subscriptions service that allows users to quickly find blogs that they might be interested in subscribing to.

The Quick Pick Subscriptions page consists of two boxes. One box contains a selected list of blog titles organized into 37 categories. Category titles include:

  • Fashionista
  • Gadget Freak
  • Hard Core Gamer
  • News Hound
  • Webmaster

The other box provides a list of that day's Top 50 subsciptions. All a user needs to do is select one or more titles of interest from these boxes and a subscription to the blog(s) will be added to their Bloglines account.

Also, translations of the Bloglines UI are now available in Italian and Dutch. You'll find links to them and other UI translations listed under the "Choose your language" header on the on the Bloglines homepage.

Postscript: I checked several relevant categories to see if our blog was listed. Sorry to report, I didn't find a link. Oh well, that's the way it goes sometimes.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:47 PM | Permalink

July 18, 2005

The Best Blog Search Is All Of Them! - Metasearch The Blogosphere With Clusty

There's plenty of talk these days about what's "the best" weblog/RSS engine. Trying to determine which specific engine is "best" would be a difficult, if not an impossible, exercise. What's "best" for me might not work for you. Plus, what's "best" on Monday might be second best on Tuesday since the the blogosphere is changing every minute.

So, instead of continuing this post in search of determining the "best" engine, let's talk about a resource that's currently available that allows you to tap results from most of the big names in weblog search.

When asked where I begin my searches of the blogosphere these days, I have an answer.

I utilize all of them! How's that for diplomacy. (-:

However, I don't go one engine at a time when running searches but instead use the power of metasearching to provide me with what I I often find to be very useful results.

When Chris and I published our overview of Clusty last year, few people seemed to notice that this meta engine also offers a webblog/RSS search tool.

For most of my blogosphere search needs, Clusty Blog Search works well.

So, is Clusty Blog Search tapping a bunch of unknown engines. Hardly!

You'll find results from several well-known blog engines:

  • Blogdigger
  • Daypop
  • Feedster
  • Technorati
  • Blogpulse
  • IceRocket

The advanced Clusty Blog Search interface is where I start most of my blog searching.

Using it allows me to increase the number of results Clusty returns while also offering the option to add or delete specific engines.

Of course, Clusty's well-known dynamic clustering is also part of their blog search tool. In some cases, the dynamic clustering can help you get you to a quality answer more quickly by providing what Clusty's owner, Vivisimo, calls a selective ignorance. Plus, I've found that clustering can also be used as a knowledge discovery. In other words, helping the searcher quickly spot trends, names, etc. that would take hours and hours to do manually.

Another feature I like about Clusty Blog Search is that it allows me to see which database or databases the results are coming from. You'll find the database name listed next to each url. It makes searching even more interesting for people who enjoy comparing results. Items available in multiple databases are grouped together.

Finally, here are a few other features you might find useful.

+ Directly above the dynamically generated clusters on the left side of the page, note the "cluster by" pull-down menu. If you select, "URL" you can quickly see where the results are coming from. Interesting and possibly another way of spotting blogs of possible interest.

+ At the top of results pages you'll see a link labeled "Details." Clicking this link allows you to find out how many results are coming from each engine. I do my best to see at least the first 100 from each engine.

+ Next to each title on a results page you'll notice a few icons. Click the "venn diagram (three circles) icon" and you'll see what cluster(s) contain the item. Items can be in more than one cluster. If you click the magnifying glass icon, you'll open a live version of the result embedded directly into the results page. A real timesaver!

Using Clusty to search the blogosphere offers an easy way to quickly see results from most of the well-known databases while also allowing you to benefit of dynamic clustering. Worth a look!

Posted by Gary Price at 3:12 PM | Permalink

July 11, 2005

FeedPlex Adds Advanced Search Options

Nathan Enns from FyberSearch has just updated his FeedPlex engine of RSS/XML material with 11 new advanced search options, including a couple that are unavailable elsewhere.

As the Feedplex database of XML and RSS content grows larger, several of these options could become very useful for building more precise queries.

The 11 advanced search options are listed below with links to learn more about each one.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:26 PM | Permalink

July 7, 2005

Gigablast Releases Travel and Blog Search Verticals

I just noticed that Matt Wells over at Gigablast has released Gigablast Blogs and Gigablast Travel.

These new specialty engines (verticals, if you like) appear to allow the searcher to search topic-focused portions of the main Gigablast web database of more than two billion pages. I hope to spend some time checking these new resources out over the weekend. If you're not familiar with Matt Wells, here's a very interesting "conversation" about Gigablast and web search in general between Matt and Steve Kirsch that was published last year in ACM Queue.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:04 PM | Permalink

June 21, 2005

How Search Engines Index RSS & Why It Doesn't Necessarily Matter

When will Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves start indexing RSS feeds properly? from Stephan Spencer spotted via InsideGoogle is a nice look at what happens with RSS feeds when major search engines encounter them -- or more correctly, what doesn't happen with them. File formats aren't recognized, text in the feed may not be indexed and other problems exist that make web search engines a bad place to go if you want to search just against feeds.

So what? As I'll explore, indexing RSS files isn't as important as it may seem, not for the twin goals of feed discovery and blog-based news.

Feeds Have Some Info; Pages Have More

What's a feed? Essentially, a list of URLs that point at web pages. Search engines index those web pages. In fact, they index a lot of those web pages better than some "feed" search engines.

For example, if you only index what comes to you in a feed, then you're going to miss out on a lot of information. That's because plenty of feeds only carry summaries of stories, not the full text of stories.

My LinkCounts & LinkStats From PubSub's Only Rough Picture, So Far post looks at how this has an impact on counting links. The situation is even worse when it comes to understanding content. If a feed isn't full text, then you don't have a full picture of what someone was talking about.

So why do you want a "feed" search engine? In my view, these are the two main reasons:

  • Feed Discovery: You want to locate feeds of interest, so you can subscribe and say in touch with news.  
  • Blog-Based News: You want to quickly get the latest news from the blogosphere.

Feed Discovery

Let's deal with the feed discovery issue first. Want feeds about cars? Here's a search at Technorati. Find the feed links, I dare you. The feed links aren't shown that I can spot. Instead, you get listings of pages that have been fed via a feed. If you're savvy, you'll visit the pages and then hunt around for the actual feed location. That's sort of feed discovery, but it's not as direct as some might like.

Here's the search at Bloglines. Apparently, the world of car-related feeds is dominated by Craiglist, because that's practically all you get on the first page. OK, let's try digital cameras.

Better. Now rather than seeing actual blog and feed posts, as with Technorati, we're getting a list of blogs and sites with feeds that generally are about about "digital cameras." IE -- you're not pointed at a particular post. You're pointed at a place that offers a feed on the topic you searched for. That's feed discovery.

How about Feedster? Again, it's a list of blog posts or pages that were in feeds. Scoot to the right of these listings, however, and you'll see an orange XML box alerting you to the idea there's a feed. So in a way, you've got feed discovery.

Yahoo has long done this. Here's a search for search engine watch. See the entry for our blog? It has this associated with it:

RSS: View as XML - Add to My Yahoo!

That's feed discovery in action at Yahoo, though it's hit and miss. Our blog feed is displayed, as is our forum feed, but the main feed for the site itself goes missing.

Certainly, such display should be consistent. But even better would be if Yahoo made it easier to find the actual feed search service it offers. Search over there for cars, and you can see the difference in getting back actual feeds that seem related to the topic. My Yahoo Feed Search & Web Search Feeds Update post looks at this in more detail.

Blog-Based News

We have excellent news search from most of the major search engines. It includes content that comes from traditional and major news players as well as small news sites from across the web. Here's a search on gm food at Google. The Food Navigator site has this article come up. It's hardly a traditional source, especially when compared to the Independent newspaper, which also has an article listed.

What the major news search engines tend not to carry are many blogs. Some are listed, but plenty aren't. Whether to integrate them as part of news search is a debate that's ongoing. Some people want the "hey, you got blogs in my news search" experience. Others want them separate.

Complicating matters more is that just putting stuff on a blog doesn't make it news, anymore than someone suddenly becomes a journalist just because they get something printed in a paper. The reality is plenty of bloggers do good journalism, plenty of journalists do bad news reporting, and the reverse and all variations you can think of!

Let's side-step that debate with the recognition that many people clearly would like to have a blog search. Blog search engines come nowhere near the popularity of major search engines, but they do generate a lot of buzz. That's no wonder. People want a sense of what's being discussed, and there's plenty of talk that goes on within blogs.

So where's the blog search with the major players? Not "where's the feed search," because that's not the same thing. There are plenty of sites with feeds that are not blogs. There are plenty of blogs that don't offer feeds. But where are the blog search services you'd have expected the major search engines to have rolled out by now?

I checked with Google on this recently, but there's nothing new I can report in terms of timing. The service has promised this would come. MSN has promised the same, but we're still waiting. More on both of those promises here: MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search?

Ask Jeeves, of course, has blog seach with Bloglines -- but it has promised better improvements to come. A9 -- not quite in the majors -- rolled out its own blog search in March that Steve Rubel found pretty killer. Actually getting to the service is pretty killer as well. Trouble finding it? The best advice is to go to A9, select the beta link, then check the Top Blogs box.

As for Yahoo, my Yahoo Feed Search & Web Search Feeds Update has them saying it's something Yahoo will consider, but better feedreading tools and management are really the priority, for now.

All The World's A Feed, And The Blogs Are Merely Players

As feeds and blogs (remember, two completely different things!) grow, search is only going to get more complex. Microsoft blogvangelist Robert Scoble has said time and again that sites without feeds are "lame," as he does today.

OK, but what happens when it's not just all the "cool kids" doing feeds but everyone doing feeds? What does feed search mean then? It means relatively nothing. It means, umm, searching the web! So banging on about search engines not indexing feeds sort of misses the point. As feeds encompass everything, the major search engines are already there.

Meanwhile, what happens when everyone is running a blog? Will blog search suddenly be so unique? Or will it be more the case that people will want "news blogs" in a news blog search, while "shopping blogs" might be in a shopping blog search and so on. Or even more likely, as search continues to go vertical, blogs of a vertical nature will be integrated within those types of results.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:23 AM | Permalink

June 8, 2005

Bloglines Adding More than 2 Million Articles Each Day to Its Database

Those of you who track the steady stream of blog, blogosphere, and RSS stats might want to add some new numbers from Bloglines that were released today to your files.

  • 500 million blog and news feed articles are now stored [and made searchable*] in the Bloglines database
  • Between January and June of this year, the size of the Bloglines index doubled
  • Each day Bloglines adds 2 million to 2.7 million new blog and news feed articles to the database

* John pointed out a few weeks ago that Bloglines is planning on launching an improved search tool sometime this summer.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:54 AM | Permalink

June 7, 2005

Searching for Online Buzz

I've often called blogs early warning systems for popular trends. Many bloggers pride themselves on keeping ahead of the curve and writing about topics or events before the mainstream media catches on. The blogosphere also makes it easy for dialogs and conversations to arise, and with the proper tools you can really get a sense of what's hot and what's not simply by tracking this blog activity.

In today's SearchDay article, Tracking Trends via the Blogosphere, I review BlogPulse, a blog search engine from Intelliseek. BlogPulse has a cool comparison search tool that lets you see the ebbs and flows in popularity of a search term over time, and also lets you map one or more terms against others to get a sense of the relative popularity of each subject.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:15 AM | Permalink

Make Your Own Tag Clouds With TagCloud.com

I wrote earlier of Yahoo News Tag Soup, which automatically groups Yahoo News stories into tag categories in a "cloud" format. Want to do the same to your own feed or a collection of feeds? Yahoo News Tag Soup creator John Herren sends news of his new TagCloud service. Sign-up for free, enter your feed, and you'll have your own tag cloud. Or give it a list of feeds, and you can make a cloud in particular subject areas.

I made two clouds to see how it works. The first below shows stories just from the Search Engine Watch Blog. The second collects stories from a range of search blogs I read. Not all of them are listed, as I didn't have the time to get everything in there (the ability to take a standard OPML export of feeds would be cool) and some feeds glitched (sorry, Threadwatch, your feed didn't validate for TagCloud). No doubt others will in short order setup a comprehensive search cloud including every blog under the sun (need a list? see this past post). I'll link across, when they do.

SEWBlogCloud SearchCloud

Yeah, I know, the borders spill across our margins. And technically, I've done wrong by putting the link data that should go in the page's header into the body. But it seems to work, and trying to put something into one particular post's header isn't easy. But you get the idea!

From what I gather, the clouds are based on what's in a current feed. So I was disappointed in our SEW Blog cloud. We cover a lot of different subjects, and the cloud doesn't take that history into account. It would be cool to see what would happen if it analyzed the full-text of all of our posts.

In addition, it remains more fun than useful if you really wanted to drill-down to find stories on a particular topic. We actually categorize all our stories at Search Engine Watch for members. You can find a list of categories shown on this page (I'll be putting a page on the blog listing all of these directly in the future, though drill-down access will remain a members-only feature).

It would be cool to see that list turned into a cloud based on number of posts. But the underlying data would remain based on us putting things into a set categorization scheme we have here. That works for us -- mileage may vary elsewhere :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:53 AM | Permalink

June 6, 2005

LinkCounts & LinkStats From PubSub's Only Rough Picture, So Far

There seems to be no end to blog search tools wanting you to have cool looking charts to prove your popularity. To prove the point, here's another one. LinkCounts from PubSub gives you an overview of top sites getting links and giving links. Want to check yourself or another site? Use the LinkStats page. But keep this big caveat in mind that the page itself tells you:

PLEASE NOTE: LinkCounts are based on the content of a site's feed(s). Some feeds only publish summaries (or even just headlines) that do not contain links. We are constantly working to improve the resolution and accuracy of our published statistics. At times we may feel that our changes are significant enough to warrant reprocessing of some or all of our historical "raw" data. These changes will most likely result in the removal and regeneration of our published historical data.

In other words, rather than counting links in actual posts, this is all apparently based only on what goes out in a feed. That's a bad, misleading thing. For example, here's the SEW Blog stats for the past 30 days. According to this, we're pretty stingy with the links, giving out only one -- ONLY ONE -- over the past month.

That's absurd. We link and link and link to all sorts of things. But since we send out 100 word summaries, only links appearing in those summaries are counted. Even then, they have to be parsed out correctly -- and PubSub's not doing that. I know that, because it's very common that a post will start out with a link -- so the link is in the summary. That happened many more times than once in the past 30 days. Heck, the summary of this post will have two links in it.

So, if you want some very rough idea of who links to you in the blogging world, this new tool gives you an idea, but it's far from a complete, accurate picture. In addition, while you see overall sites linking, you aren't show individual backlinks. In other words, you have to hunt around in a site to find the actual link.

Postscript: PubSub got in touch to note that we don't send links in our summaries at all -- so there's nothing there to count! But I haven't heard back about why they mysteriously have found some to count anyway in the odd case. And the underlying point remains. Only links parsed out of a feed are counted, which will skew the stats.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:25 PM | Permalink

Speakwire Adds New Feature, Listen to Any RSS Feed

A quick update to my post from last week about Speakwire's new service that allows you to "listen" to RSS feeds. When I wrote the post, one of the issues with the service (I heard from several of you about this) is that it only worked for selected feeds. As of today, Speakwire now allows you to listen to any RSS feed. Look for the box near the bottom of the page labeled "custom feed." Enter the feed's url and you're ready to listen. More about Speakwire and its sister service Speegle, here.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:45 AM | Permalink

June 2, 2005

Feedster Completes Round of Venture Capital Funding

Earlier this week I posted about Become.com completing a round of funding. Today, word from Feedster that they've also just done the same thing. How much funding? Numbers aren't included in this news release but we do learn that some of the money will be used to greatly expand their server infrastructure.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:22 AM | Permalink

June 1, 2005

Finding Bloggers in Anytown, USA

Last week, Gary blogged about Blogdigger's new local search feature. Rather than helping you find local businesses or services, Blogdigger local uses some interesting technology to pinpoint the physical location of individual bloggers in the United States. I take a closer look at this new service in today's SearchDay article, Searching for Bloggers Near You.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 3:22 AM | Permalink

May 31, 2005

"Hear" Selected RSS Feeds

Don't feel like reading RSS feeds but would rather listen to them?

I just noticed that C.E.C. Systems, the company that provides Speegle, is offering a free service called Speakwire that allows you to have selected RSS feeds read to you using the same synthesized speech technology.

Using Speakwire is easy. Just click what feeds you would like to hear. Unfortuntately, you're not able to Speakwire read "any" feed to you. The service currently makes over 80 feeds available including: + Threadwatch + Slashdot + BBC World News + New York Times Business News + Reuters Entertainment News

You can also have Speakwire remember (sets a cookie) what feeds you would like to have read.

Last Fall, Speegle, another service from C.E.C. Systems that allows you to have your Google search results read to you using one of three synthesized voices got a considerable amount of attention.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:40 PM | Permalink

Topix.net CEO Speaks; FeedMesh Unified Blog Ping/Update Service Oveview

A couple of RSS-related items that crossed my desk today.

First, EditorsWeblog.com reports on recent presentations at the 58th annual World Newspaper Conference and the 12th World Editors Forum from Topix.net CEO, Rich Skrenta.

Second, the eWeek article: RSS Updates Moving Beyond Pings, takes a look at the FeedMesh weblog/RSS update service that several companies are working together to develop.

What's a FeedMesh? Called FeedMesh, the approach takes the dozens of ping services that exist today a step further by seeking cooperation among aggregators to share updates among themselves. The idea for the initiative, which is being championed by PubSub Concept Inc., was hatched last year during an informal meeting of aggregators and other leaders involved in RSS and blogging.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:26 PM | Permalink

Yahoo Feed Search & Web Search Feeds Update

Last September, my Yahoo, How About A Feed Search Tab? article wished for Yahoo to make it easier for people to find its feed search service. Similarly, I recently wished that Yahoo's new web search feeds were easier to find. Any plans for these things to change? Nothing immediate, says Yahoo, unfortunately.

Want to search for feeds at Yahoo? Here are the clunky instructions. Go to the Add Content page of My Yahoo! How about a proper home for this?

"Our focus has been primarily on making sure the search is seamless for My Yahoo users. But, we're hearing more people asking for this [a better location]. I think that's something we're going to look at pretty closely," said Scott Gatz, senior director, personalization product, at Yahoo.

And what about an enhanced feed search service, one that actually lets you search for matching posts from a feed, rather than just locate feeds generally based on their titles and descriptions (more on this is covered in the Submitting RSS Feeds To Yahoo story for Search Engine Watch members).

Gatz said work right now remains building tools to help people subscribe to, manage and integrate content into the Yahoo experience, rather than building out a dedicated feed/blog search service. But he left a at least a glimmer of hope.

"We're always listening, and as the consumer need grows, we'll be sure to get there."

Meanwhile, what about those web search feeds that are hard to find. The new Yahoo Publisher's Guide To RSS says of them:

Yahoo! Search ? lets you create an RSS feed for any set of search results. Also, web search results from RSS publishers (CNN.com for example) automatically display a link to the corresponding RSS URL.

However, that's only correct for those who have a newsreader enabled for auto-discovery, which Yahoo's own My Yahoo is not. My Yahoo Gains RSS Feeds For Web Search & Discovering Auto-Discovery article explains this more and provides a workaround if you can't use auto-discovery. But how about just adding a visible RSS feed link to the search results pages, in the way that MSN does and Yahoo does itself for news search feeds?

"When it came to the rest of the search RSS feeds, we wanted to start off simple for those folks with toolbars, Firefox and Safari. We wanted to get our feet wet with that and learn how they are using them before opening it. It way a way to soft launch and get it out there in front of people in the know," Gatz said.

So, a visible link is likely to come. But in the meantime, the soft launch continues. FYI, if you use the Yahoo Toolbar, it has auto-discovery built in, to send a feed to your My Yahoo page, Gatz said.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:05 PM | Permalink

May 20, 2005

New From Yahoo: Guide to RSS for Publishers

The new Yahoo Publisher's Guide to RSS will be especially useful as a one-stop shop for those just getting started with the format but can also serve as a worthwhile reference for experienced RSS types.

The site includes an intro to RSS, how to create feeds with several services (not just Yahoo 360), info about submitting and promoting your feed, a link to sign-up for alerts about new services from Yahoo (RSS advertising), and more.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:30 PM | Permalink

May 19, 2005

Blogdigger Goes Local

Blogdigger, a blog search engine being developed by Greg Gershman, has launched a new service called Blogdigger Local (beta) that allows you to search for blog posts by geographic location.

You can search Blogdigger Local by entering a city/state or Zip Code along with your search terms. This initial beta release only supports about 50,000 US cities and zip codes but expect support for more locations soon. If you're interested in seeing what's being said outside the U.S., Greg suggests entering the latitude and longitude on the advanced interface (coming soon).

Results can be sorted by date or relevance. Result pages also include a link to a map of the location and a list of other local blogs. It's also possible to create an RSS feed for your Blogdigger Local search strategy.

According to the FAQ, Blogdigger is using a "number of methods" to determine a blogs location.

The best way is to support the ICBM or geoPosition meta data specification which defines your site's latitude/longitude as an HTML metatag. More information can be found at GeoURL.

If you need help finding your latitude and longitude, this geocoder (U.S. only) will supply you with the info. This database can help with international coordinates.

If and when more bloggers begin including GeoURL info in their blog's metadata, Blogdigger Local and similar services will become more and more useful.

More about Blogdigger Local and local advertising opportunities here.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:30 AM | Permalink

May 18, 2005

Bloglines Adds Weather Forecasts

I just came across a new feature from Bloglines the delivers local weather forecasts and info. I then noticed that both the Bloglines Blog and the Ask Jeeves Blog have details.

Adding weather info as is simple as typing in the city name (I found forecasts from around the globe) or the Zip Code and then deciding where you want a seven day forecast to appear in your feeds. A box to enter a location is found on the Bloglines homepage or by going to "My Feeds", clicking the "Add" link and then selecting Weather. The weather feature is localized in the 8 different languages that Bloglines supports.

Note: If you're entering the city name it's a good idea to also enter the state name or country name since the same city name can be used in many states or in different countries. For example, Springfield's are found in many states. Are you looking for Moscow, Russia (the deafault) or Moscow, Idaho?

At the end of March, Danny blogged about Bloglines launching a package tracking feature.

Both weather info and package tracking are part of a Bloglines initiative to create a "universal inbox."

Posted by Gary Price at 9:29 AM | Permalink

May 9, 2005

Feedster Publishes RSS Tutorial For Safari Users

Here's one for the Mac folks out there. If you're using the Safari browser that's part of the Apple Tiger release you might want to take a look at a tutorial that the Feedster team has authored about using Safari's RSS features.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:12 PM | Permalink

April 26, 2005

New Blog Buzz from BlogPulse; Database Now Tracking More than 10 Million Blogs

Those of you who track blogosphere buzz might be interested to learn that BlogPulse (from Intelliseek) has released some new stats today.

Fast Facts: + Yahoo! and NY Times remain top sources cited by bloggers. The San Francisco Chronicle and News.com are now found on the list of top cited sources. ++ Most Cited Blogs 1) Boing Boing 2) Engadget.com (up from No. 13 in 2004) ++ Other Big Movers on the Most Cited List MichelleMalkin.com (No. 23 to No. 7) Gizmodo.com (No. 17 to No. 8)

BlogPulse also announced that their now tracking more than 10 million blogs. That's about 700,000 more blogs than were being tracked just two months ago. I hope that in their next release BlogPulse will provide more info about these numbers. For example: + What criteria do they use to determine what is and is not a blog? + How many of the 10 million blogs are being updated on a regular (let's say weekly) basis? How many haven't been updated in a month or more? Do blogs that are remain online but haven't been updated count in the total? + How many are "ad blogs" or simply republish news headlines from one or more news aggregators onto a page and then surround the headlines with ads? + How many have RSS feeds? How many don't?

Just how large is 10 million blogs? Here are a few ways to think of the number.

+ There are more blogs (about 1 million more) than people living in the metropolitan Chicago (about 9 million people). + There are about the same number of blogs as people living in the combined metro areas of San Francisco, Boston, and Orlando. + Finally 10 million blogs also means that there are about 2.5 million more blogs than people living in London (7.6 million). Numbers cited come from The World Almanac 2005.

Postscript: This post from the Blogpulse blog has the answers to a couple of the questions I posed earlier.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:39 AM | Permalink

April 19, 2005

FeedPlex, An Engine for XML Content Relaunches in Beta

FeedPlex, an engine for XML content (RSS, RDF) is back online. The database is being revamped and expanded by Nathan Enns, the person who also runs FyberSearch. Enns acquired FeedPlex last year from Sid Yadav who also runs The Daily Rundown blog.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:57 AM | Permalink

April 14, 2005

Another Poke At Tags As Search Savior

I've been dubious before about tagging in relation to search, but Steve Rubel's Targeting Through Tagvertising article makes me want to poke at them a few more times for a reality check. He writes:

Type the word "blogs" into Google and it can't tell if you are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to read blogs, et cetera.

Sure -- and that's true of every major search engine, an age old problem. They generally solve it by offering query refinement tools, such as the related searches links that Yahoo offers. Google's problem is that it among the majors has never offered query refinement and is long overdue to do so. Google Suggest, if ever rolled out to the main site, will help.

As for query refinement in general, see my Google Ranking Itself Tops For Britney Spears & The Need For Better Categorization post for even more background on how this potentially can route searchers in the correct direction.

Steve suggests tagging as a solution to the query refinement problem:

Using del.icio.us you can bookmark this page or subscribe to its RSS feed. Then, everyday you will find the latest interesting links consumers are finding and sharing about blog marketing.

The page he bookmarked is for blog entries tagged as "blogs marketing." OK, the tagging didn't help on the query refinement challenge at all here. Go to the del.icio.us home page. Now try to imagine you are someone searching for information on blogs and marketing -- an ordinary person, not someone hip to the mojo of tagging.

Good luck. Unlike a directory such as the ODP, there's no list of categories to begin with and help you drill down into an interest area. Blogs is a popular tag, so it does at least show up in the "Most Active" list of the page. Click on that, and you can see all the "blogs" stories out there.

But I wanted blog marketing stories, right? How do I get those? Better understand that you need to join the terms that you are looking for together in the address bar of your browser with a plus sign, like this:

http://del.icio.us/tag/blogs+marketing

Yep, that's intuitive. If you -- ordinary person -- are savvy enough to do all this, suffice to say you were probably smart enough over on Google to have just typed in blogs marketing into the search box -- and doing so gets you answers on that topic, no tagging required.

What that doesn't do is help you keep up with the latest posts on that topic. But again, I can do that with no tags required. Head over to Google Alerts, and then you can have any changed information for whatever terms you want to monitor across the web or in news content sent to you via email.

No, Google lamely doesn't offer this via RSS. But Yahoo does, if you want to do a news search. MSN does for any type of search it offers. And various blog search services allow this -- in all cases, without tags being required.

So let's not hand over wonder powers to tagging yet. In fact, how about a closer look at some tag kryptonite? Looking back at the del.icio.us tag/category for blogs today, I got treated to these fine, relevant entries:

  • A site about restaurants because it's a "restaurant blog." It has nothing to do with blogging other than being a blog, so the relevancy is pretty pitiful.  
  • A site called "extended cake mix," which aside from being a blog, seems to have nothing to do with blogs whatsoever.  
  • An entry called New Satellite Image of Space Shuttle "Stack", from some odd web site called ResourceShelf. Yep, that's Gary's research blog. Like me, he's dubious about tagging for lacking a controlled vocabulary (and also see his further comments about tagging here). And here we see it in action, as his entry about the space shuttle falls into the blog category simply because it was seen on a blog.  
  • An entry called "Now you can blog about your sex life! Bet my blog is bigger than yours!," which I visited for research purposes. If you were looking for an adult friend, then that's the site for you. If you were looking for information about blogs -- as this tagged page ought to provide -- sorry, dear reader, you look to have been spammed.

By the way -- did you want information on blogs, blog or blogging? Those three are independent tags that will produce different information, since there's no coordination going on.

I think tagging can be cool in the right areas. Del.icio.us is cool to be because it's serendipitous. I can see a post on the home page of interest, then click on one of the tag links to explore new areas that probably will have a lot of relevant stuff on a particular topics. And because a post can have multiple tags, I get a lot more variety than the somewhat similar category links that a search on Yahoo provides (and that Google used to).

But mark me dubious that tagging will be the great savior for search, which attracts many more people and provides a great incentive for spam. Controlled tagging -- in the form of directory categorization -- has already been prone to spamming at places like the Open Directory. Wide-open tagging, where anyone can get their pages to the top of a list just by labeling it so, is going to be a giant spam magnet.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:25 AM | Permalink

April 7, 2005

Newspapers Branding Their Own RSS Tools

It seems like everyone wants something to do with RSS these days. A Wired News article talks about several newspapers preparing to launch their own branded RSS/feed aggregators and then bundling individual feeds (from disparate sources) into various topics that users can choose from.

Yes, you can do this by creating keyword searches with one of a number of feed engines like Technorati, Feedster and Pubsub. However, is this easy enough for the non-tech crowd or for that matter, do they even understand what an aggregator/feeds could offer them? This point is made in the following passage. As you now see, I think it's a good one.

Gil Asakawa, executive producer of DenverPost.com, said the newspaper is developing its own newsreader software to make stories syndicated through RSS more accessible to average readers.

Whereas newsreaders require users to build news libraries by locating an RSS feed from each website they want to follow, News Hound will bundle several news feeds organized into categories. "The consumer benefit is that not all newspaper readers are early adopters," Asakawa said. "We want to make RSS available to people that are not technically savvy."

Posted by Gary Price at 11:49 AM | Permalink

April 6, 2005

Feedster Adds Search Term Highlighting

A tweak at Feeedster to mention. I just noticed that the blog/RSS feed engine is now highlighting your search terms in their static search result snippets.

For example, you'll see that my search terms (Ipod and shuffle) bolded in the result snippets.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:15 AM | Permalink

March 30, 2005

Keeping Current With Persistent Search Tools

The Wall Street Journal is online with an about persistent search from companies like PubSub. The article is titled: New Web-Watching Tools Pique Interest of Investors.

Providers of persistent-search services like to say it's "prospective," or forward-looking, rather than "retrospective," which is how they describe aggregators such as Yahoo and Google. It often takes most search engines days to add new content from sources such as blogs or corporate Web sites. Yahoo and Google scan billions of sites and download them into their massive computer databases, which can add a significant time lag between when content appears and when it is available for searches. Google does provide a service that will notify users of new Web content, but with less urgency when compared to persistent-search engines.

Btw, one of my favorite tools (one I couldn't live without) is called WebSite-Watcher (Windows only). This very stable shareware monitors both RSS feeds and just about ANY web page for changes. WSW then notifies you when changes occur (you define how often it looks for changes) and highlights the new or changed text. Think about all of the pages on the web where no RSS feed is available but you really need to check on a very regular basis. Sometimes the addition or removal of just a couple of words can signal something big about to happen. TrackEngine, is very similar if you want a web-based solution. Other services include: + WatchThatPage.com + Trackle.com

We're also started to see targeted tools looking for new material in specific areas of interest. For example, DiplomacyMonitor.com, looks for new primary documents from governments around world and posts them onto a single page while at the same time caching the content and making it all searchable.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:58 AM | Permalink

Bloglines Adds Package Tracking; More To Come

Bloglines has rolled out a new package tracking feature today that keeps you updated on the progress of items being shipped through FedEx, UPS or the US Postal Service.

To access the feature, use the My Feeds tab, then the Add link, then you'll see a new Package Tracking link that appears in the Subscribe window. Enter the tracking number for the appropriate service, and you're subscribed.

Bloglines says this is another step toward a "universal inbox" it wants to build where all types of information can be collected. Chris Sherman will be taking a closer look at this in the near future.

For some additional quotes from the company, see Bloglines adds package tracking to its service from IDG.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:15 AM | Permalink

March 29, 2005

Track Blogosphere Buzz with New and Improved BlogPulse 2.0

Those of you who track blogosphere buzz will be happy to learn the BlogPulse from Intelliseek has just released several enhancements.to the service. These enhancements include: + Larger index (Blogpulse now is tracking 9.3 million blogs) + New six month index of posts + Improved visualization capabilities + New box (upper left corner of homepage) with index stats. For example, in the past 24 hours, Blogpulse identified 35,970 new blogs. You can learn about other new features and improvements in the news release.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:56 AM | Permalink

Google's Orkut Media Offers RSS Feeds

With the Yahoo 360 social networking site making its semi-public debut, I thought it would be interesting to log back into rival service Orkut, offered by Google, to see what's new. But forget comparing features. What struck me the most was seeing a Google property finally acknowledging RSS as a distribution means.

Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves all offer several ways to get content or aggregate content through feeds. But web search listings from Google via RSS? Nope. Google News updates that way? Nope. Anything significant from Google via RSS? Not that comes to mind, discounting the fact that individuals using Blogger can use feeds, of course. The silence otherwise has been deafening.

Given this, it was a pretty big surprise to come across from a March 23 letter from the editor of Orkut Media, Gavin Tachibana, explaining RSS. It concluded:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) programs allow you to get the latest news from the sites that you choose, all on one site, on a program called a newsreader. RSS lets web sites publish "feeds" that can be collected on this newsreader, say one like Bloglines.

Many of the major sites currently offer RSS feeds, including our very own here at orkut media starting today. You'll notice the fashionable orange XML button on the bottom of this week's Porch. (XML is short for eXtensible Markup Language.) Right click on the button (or hold down the Ctrl key while you click if on a Mac), then copy the link into your newsreader. To learn more about newsreaders, please read our About RSS page.

Try it out. Let us know what you think. By all means, keep reading your newspaper. And watch decent TV news. But just in case the Web takes over and RSS feeds is where you'll need to be, now you can be ready.

For more, see the Orkut Media RSS page.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:35 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2005

More Press For the Vertical Search Biz

Olga Kharif's Business Week article: Search, the Next Generation, takes a look at the increase in specialized tools (aka verticals) that haven been coming fast and furious lately and several of which have been mentioned on the SEW Blog or in SearchDay before. You'll read about: + Become.com ||| SEW Blog Post

+ Nextaris ||| SEW Blog/SearchDay Posts

+ BlogStreet

+ FactBites

+ Snap.Com ||| SEW Post

Posted by Gary Price at 10:49 AM | Permalink

March 16, 2005

Feedster Improves Advanced Search Syntax

Those of you who used advanced search syntax to help create more precise queries (yes, I'm member of the group) might be interested to learn that Feedster has just made some of its already robust syntax easier to use. It's all documented here. Impressive! I'm very happy to see that the proximity operator (near) remains available. You're even able to specify how many words "term a" can be from "term b." If you don't specify a number, the default is ten words in either direction. Presently, the only large general web engine to offer a proximity operator is Exalead. Too bad. When available, proximity operators can help deliver more precise results. Kudos to Feedster on improving their already robust search syntax.

Michael Fagan (yes, THE Michael Fagan of FaganFinder fame) has more on the Feedster blog.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:30 PM | Permalink

Yahoo 360 To Offer Photo Sharing, Social Networking & Blogging

Yahoo 360 is a new online photo sharing, social networking and blogging service that Yahoo is privately beta testing. Interested? You can sign-up via a waiting list link on the site. Well, you're supposed to be able to. That wasn't working when I tested it. Yahoo 360 takes spin through blogosphere from News.com has a few more details on the service. Charlene Li at Forrester has more in Yahoo! announces blogging and social networking betas. Via Steve Rubel, Yahoo 360 Fuses Social Networking and Blogs from the AP has details of a March 29 release date.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:10 PM | Permalink

March 15, 2005

A9 is Now in the Weblog Search Business

A brief addendum to Danny's post about A9's just announced OpenSearch service. When you review the list of databases already available you'll see that A9 has also launched their own weblog search engine called "A9 Top Blogs Search." It currently provides searchable access to, "a constantly updated set of recent blog entries from over three hundred of the most influential English language blogs on the web." I was unable to find a list of what 300+ blogs are being searched or what criteria A9 uses to determine a blogs influence.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:25 PM | Permalink

OpenSearch: Add Your Own Search Engine To A9 (Or Potentially, Anywhere)

A9's new OpenSearch program out today allows anyone with search results to create their own "button" that can be added to the A9 search engine, allowing users there to get custom specialty or vertical search results.

A number of new buttons A9 users can add have already been posted on the site, in conjunction with the announcement that was made at the Etech conference today from Amazon chief Jeff Bezos. You can add things like a NASA search, a Flickr Photo Search or even a search for chess games. It's pretty slick.

Just because you create a button doesn't mean that users will automatically get them, of course. They'll have to use the page above to find options, then choose to add them. And that may happen only if you've created the search and submitted it. How to create and submit is covered in the help documents for OpenSearch.

From what I can tell, OpenSearch is built around adding some minimal extensions to RSS, which seems to be Amazon's way of escaping criticism that it's trying to do something proprietary and gain acceptance. Indeed, while A9 will tap into these search RSS feeds, potentially anyone else could, as well, as it explains:

OpenSearch offers an alternative: an open format that will enable those search results to be displayed anywhere, anytime. Rather than introduce yet another proprietary or closed protocol, OpenSearch is a straightforward and backward-compatible extension of RSS 2.0, the widely adopted XML-based format for content syndication.

For a bit more, see John Battelle's post that covers the announcement and has some comments for A9 head Udi Manber: A9 Launches "Open Search" - Vertical Search, Syndicated.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:16 PM | Permalink

March 12, 2005

Mobile Access to Your My Yahoo RSS Feeds

As Danny pointed out the other day, mobile access to info and search services continue to be of interest to me. Services from new players as well as from established companies are appearing on a daily basis.

As this CMPNet Asia story points out, that the mobile version of My Yahoo now allows you to view your RSS feeds via your WAP browser. In other words, My Yahoo joins Bloglines from Ask Jeeves as services offering mobile tools to access your feeds. More info and details about how to access your feeds via My Yahoo Mobile in the story: Yahoo Launches Mobile RSS News Feed and in the Yahoo Search Blog post: My Yahoo! Mobile RSS.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:11 PM | Permalink

March 9, 2005

Tools for Exploring the Blogosphere

There's a lot of great content being published in blogs these days, but it isn't always easy to find. While many bloggers link to other blogs, you're never really sure what the motivation is for providing the link. And even though blog search engines work well for finding specific posts related to a topic, they don't do a very good job of identifying specific bloggers that write regularly on topics that might interest you.

Today's SearchDay article, A Cool Blog Discovery Tool features services from Blogstreet that go beyond simple approaches, surfacing relationships and interlinkages between blogs that might not otherwise be readily apparent. These tools can help pinpoint bloggers that you might not otherwise stumble upon in the increasingly crowded reaches of the blogosphere.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:32 AM | Permalink

March 1, 2005

A Blogosphere Buzz/ Web Trends Tool From Accenture

It looks like Accenture is joining IBM's WebFountain, Intelliseek and others in monitoring buzz and reputation from the web and blogosphere.

The Canada.com article: Net searcher has its ears to the blog, provides background about a prototype reputation/blogosphere buzz sevice called "Online Search" from Accenture's Tech Lab in Palo Alto.

"If you're a political adviser and a scandal appears, you want to correct errors quickly, without inflating the scandal. If you're a company, you need to gauge when a rumour about your product is large enough that you must respond, (and) shut up the moment it starts to fade," said Gary Boone, a machine learning expert and group leader on the search project. In the demonstration engine searches are refreshed daily; but the system could easily be tweaked to capture near-instant monitoring of stocks, Boone said.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:25 PM | Permalink

February 17, 2005

Jeeves Creates Smart Search Shortcuts for Blogs and RSS

I've noticed a couple of new Smart Search result boxes on Ask Jeeves serps. If you search for the term blogs or weblog you'll see a Smart Search box (at the top of the page) that includes numerous links with basic info about blogs and RSS that come from AJ's recent acquisition, Bloglines. A search box for the Bloglines search engine is also part of the Smart Result. A Smart Answer for RSS is also online. It includes a link to Bloglines, info about RSS standards from Harvard and links to RSS feeds from Moreover. Placing these links in a single location at the top of results page can not only help someone new to blogs and RSS access basic info quickly and easily but also help promote the Bloglines service.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:21 AM | Permalink

February 14, 2005

Findory Adds Favorites

Findory CEO Greg Linden has posted on his blog that Findory has added another new feature called 'Favorites'.

For example, on the BBC page, clicking the "Add Favorite" button at the upper right will put a link to BBC articles in your "My Favorites" list.

Greg's post goes on to explain his views on customization (most feed readers) vs. personalization (Findory).

Posted by Gary Price at 2:24 PM | Permalink

Feedster Integrated into Onfolio 2.0

Last March, Chris had many positive things to say about Onfolio, a web search assistant. Today, a new release of Onfolio is available (ver. 2.0). It includes MANY new features including the integration of Feedster into Onfolio. Other new features in Onfolio 2.0 include complete integration with Firefox and an RSS news reader.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:54 PM | Permalink

February 12, 2005

Feed Search at Yahoo?

Yeterday, Steve "I'm reviewing my logs" Rubel over at Micro Persuasion posted an item about noticing a crawler named "Yahoo-NewsCrawler Test" in his RSS logs. The Yahoo News "test" crawler (Yahoo also has a crawler named Yahoo Newscrawler) was also seen and reported in a WMW post about two weeks ago. Rubel's posts goes on to speculate that Yahoo might be adding an feed search option to their news search database and/or offer it as a standalong service. It's a good question but Yahoo! isn't offering any details about what, if anything, they're up to at this time. We asked Yahoo! for a comment and received back the following:

As part of our ongoing commitment to improving the user experience we are always testing a variety of new technologies.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:16 PM | Permalink

February 10, 2005

CNET Gains Web-Based Feed Reading Service

Steve Rubel's CNET to Launch Web-Based RSS Reader article has the scoop on a new web-based feed reading service called Newsburst that's now live.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:11 AM | Permalink

February 8, 2005

It's Official: Ask Jeeves Acquires Bloglines

Today, Ask Jeeves is announcing that they've acquired Bloglines, a well-known, critically acclaimed, and free web-based RSS aggregation tool for an undisclosed sum of money. The move confirms rumors that have been around since Saturday.

Jim Lanzone, senior vp of search properties at AJ has been a Bloglines user since its early days and thought the service would would fit well with what Ask Jeeves already provides.

"This acquisition is more of an investment to allow Bloglines to achieve their roadmap more quickly," Lanzone said.

According to Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, the deal has been in the works since last September.

At the present time, Ask Jeeves has no plans to change anything about what Bloglines offers. It will still be available at Bloglines.com and will remain free. While many know and use Bloglines as an RSS aggregation service, it offers a wide array of tools including:

+ A weblog and RSS search engine that Ask Jeeves hopes to turn into a "world class" resource using their Teoma technology. + A weblog publishing platform including an option to quickly clip and annotate items from weblogs and feeds. Blogs are hosted on the Bloglines server. + A directory of RSS feeds. + An option to access your email discussion lists using the Bloglines aggregator while simultaneously reducing spam to your primary email account. + User Interfaces in six languages.

The LawLibTech blog offers an excellent Bloglines tutorial.

Today's acquisition also fits well with Ask Jeeves recently discussed mobile search plans. Bloglines works with WAP enabled devices. In fact, this is the way I frequently access the service.

The acquisition should could also help with Ask Jeeves getting some attention and "cred" in the blogging, RSS, and "early adopter" communities where Bloglines has a very large and loyal user base. Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher began the service in June 2003. He sold another online service he started, eGroups, to Yahoo in September 2000.

The acquisition is another step toward Ask Jeeves rebuilding a great brand in search it originally had but which faltered between around 1999-2002.

Not The Same Old Butler In the past two years, Ask Jeeves has moved from a lackluster web search provider to a well-rounded search service that I not only use but have zero problems recommending to others.

In my view, the turnaround began with AJ's purchase of Teoma in September 2001 and ending the idea of using humans to pre-suppose thousands of question and answer sets. In 2003, Ask was one of the first large web search providers to jump on what is now a growing trend of providing direct answers on search results pages.

2004 was a busy year for The Butler. Not only did he trim down and get a makeover, but Ask Jeeves:

+ Launched a local search product (using data provided via a partnership with CitySearch) + Introduced, My Jeeves, a personal search product + Continued developing and releasing new "Smart Answer" options including Famous People Search + Debuted a desktop search product

Moving forward, I believe one of the biggest challenges Jeeves faces is their name and their past. While many people know that Ask Jeeves is a search tool, it's often associated with the poor service that Jeeves previously provided. Acquisitions of a high quality service like Bloglines, should help the company get many more people to take a look at the work that they've been doing for the past four years.

Postscript: Welcome, Bloglines! from the Ask Jeeves blog provides the tale of the purchase from Ask Jeeves vice president Jim Lanzone, along with how Ask hopes to build with Bloglines to create a great blog search engine. Bloglines also has a FAQ and information on the purchase here: Letter to Bloglines Subscribers

Posted by Gary Price at 12:01 AM | Permalink

February 7, 2005

PubSub Offers Real-Time Feed of Earthquake Information

PubSub, the matching engine and alert service that offers feeds of newsgroup and weblog content, is online this afternoon with a new real-time feed (delivered via RSS, email, or PubSub Sidebar) with up-to-the-minute earthquake information from around the globe. The content comes via a data stream provided by the United States Geological Survey. You can limit your alert feed to earthquakes that reach a certain magnitude and by region. PubSub offers a growing list of real-time alerts including U.S. airport delays, SEC EDGAR filings, and press releases from a variety of services.

I've also noticed that PubSub has plans to begin delivering alerts and other information via SMS (text messaging).

Posted by Gary Price at 1:35 PM | Permalink

Ask Jeeves To Buy Bloglines? Postscript, the rumors are confirmed: It's Official: Ask Jeeves Acquires Bloglines.

Various places are reporting that Ask Jeeves is to acquire the Bloglines feed search and reading service:

  • Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines at Napsterization is apparently the source of the rumor, though neither Ask Jeeves or Bloglines are quoted confirming the acquisition.  
  • Ask Jeeves to buy Bloglines? from News.com revisits the Napsterization post and notes that Ask Jeeves has scheduled an announcement for Monday.

I can confirm that as with the News.com story we've been told Ask Jeeves will be making an announcement today and are preparing a story to release for it. Due to an embargo on the news, we can't discuss what we've been told unless the embargo broken by someone citing an official Ask Jeeves source.

The Napsterization post notes that the newly launched Ask Jeeves Blog has had exclusive links to Top Blogs and Most Popular Blog Links provided by Bloglines, further signs of some type of potential partnership.

If the move happens, it will leave Google as the only major portal not offering some type of feed subscription service. See also:

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread, Ask Jeeves Reportedly Acquires Bloglines.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:44 AM | Permalink

February 2, 2005

Visualize A Weblogs "Neighborhood"

Findory, the "personalized" news and weblog tool (yes, you can also search the database) has introduced a new service today.

It's now possible to "visualize" a blogs "neighborhood." In other words, you can see how "connected" or "related" a specific blog is to others. The more connected, the bigger the point size. The smaller the point size the less connected. You can click here to see the Search Engine Watch Blog neighborhood or here to see Boing Boing's neighborhood.

To find "neighborhoods" for other blogs: 1) Search Findory for the blogs title 2) Find an article from the blog and click on the "title" link 3) Look for the "neighborhoods" link on the right side of the page

How does Findory determine what makes up a neighborhood? Greg Linden tells us,

Findory's weblog neighborhoods are determined by a combination of overlap in what the blogs are writing about and overlap between readers of the blogs. It is based on content and aggregate reader behavior.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:03 PM | Permalink

Feedster's New Look

The Scott on Feedster blog notes that Feedster has just introduced a new and I must say sleeker looking user interface. It includes a list (updated every three minutes) with some of the latest search queries. If you want to compare the new UI with the old one, here's a cached copy of how Feedster used to look. Scott Johnson points out that a great deal of the development was done by FaganFinder's, Michael Fagan (he's interning at the Feedster hq for the next few months). Thanks to SC for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:40 PM | Permalink

January 28, 2005

Rojo: Feed Search Plus Social Networking

The new Rojo social networking service that utilizes RSS and search is featured in the Technology Review article So what are you reading these days?. The twist with Rojo? There's also a social networking aspect:

Like some of its competitors, Rojo has an RSS feed search function and gives readers the ability to flag stories they find important or interesting. But in enabling users to draw on the insights of friends, family, colleagues, and others in their social networks, Rojo departs from most of the competition. Rojo users can invite others to sign up for Rojo accounts; those accounts are linked, much like the accounts on the popular website Friendster.

Want to try it? It's invite only by existing members, for the moment -- though you can request an invite on the site.

Thanks GL for the tip!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:41 AM | Permalink

January 25, 2005

My MSN Adds Feed Discovery Support

As rumored to come, MSN has now added added feed discovery and subscription services for those using its My MSN service.

A new feed search tool is offered at the top of the My MSN home page or you can also find it here, if you are signed in. It allows you to search for feeds that contain the words you are looking for in automatically-created descriptions.

Note that this is not the same as searching through the full-text of feeds themselves. As a result, individual postings put out in feed format and blogs are not searchable, in the way a service like Feedster allows.

In addition, this is not a blog search engine. That's because any site may have feeds, so a feed search includes more than blogs. In addition, some blogs don't have feeds and so wouldn't be included in a feed search service.

MSN is working on actual blog search engine that is supposed to come in the future to its main MSN Search site that's open to the public without registration. To date, no major search engine yet offers blog search. My MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search? article looks at this more.

In the meantime, the feed discovery tool on My MSN is powered by Moreover. This isn't disclosed with a "powered by" disclaimer when you do a search, but after subscribing to a feed, Moreover clickthrough redirection is used. In addition, the company is named a partner in the following articles spotted via Greg Linden's blog:

Once a feed has been found, My MSN users can then subscribe to it and read posts via boxes added to their My MSN home page. MSN also provides the ability to quickly select from small list of major site -- what it calls Recommended Sources -- via an All Content.

Yahoo has offered feed discovery and subscription for several months, as the Yahoo, How About A Feed Search Tab? explores more. Google remains lacking in this area.

Via the MSN Search Blog, news also that MSN has launched a new MSN Syndicated Content page. That page lists all the feeds that come from MSN itself. The company also sticks with the RSS name for feeds despite some debate on what RSS stands, different flavors of RSS and a rival format for feeds called Atom (note that most feedreaders can handle any format).

Interestingly, MSN itself doesn't find the name that descriptive or user-friendly. Hey MSN, "syndicated content" isn't that descriptive to a person new to feeds, either. Nevertheless, it went forward with RSS as this SiliconBeat article describes for lack of anything better.

As a result, the acronym will likely continue as the def acto term for describing feeds. Meanwhile, Dave Winer takes a swing that My MSN will be making use of its own subscription buttons to promote signing up via My MSN, as described here. Others like Yahoo also have their own buttons.

For more on the issue of various feed promotion buttons and discovery difficulties, see my past post, More On Making Feed Discovery & Subscription Easier.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:31 AM | Permalink

January 14, 2005

Yahoo Gains Financial Feeds; A Revisit To Yahoo News Feeds

Yahoo gained RSS feeds for news content last fall, and now it has regained them for the Yahoo Finance service, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny reports in his Yahoo Finance RSS Feeds Return post.

For financial feeds, visit the Yahoo Finance RSS feed tool that's now been created. Enter a symbol, and magically, logos to add the feed to your My Yahoo account or any newsreader through an XML icon and URL will appear. Slick.

Note that the tool doesn't check whether the company stock symbol you enter is valid, so ensure that you have it correct first. Jeremy notes in his post that you can enter multiple symbols separated by commas (yhoo,goog) to make a "portfolio" style feed.

How about a revisit to getting those Yahoo News feeds? OK! First, visit the Yahoo News RSS Feed page. There, you'll find a variety of feeds in various categories such as "science" or "health" have already been created.

Not enough? Need something custom. Scroll down to the search box, enter a term and a feed will load in your browser. Ugh -- that needs to change to work like the Yahoo Finance tool, where you get clickable links.

Have no fear, there's a better workaround. Go to Yahoo News, do a keyword search for what you are interested in. Now look in the right-hand column of the page. You'll see an "ADD TO MY YAHOO! / RSS" section. Use the My Yahoo button that's offered to subscribe through My Yahoo or the XML icon to subscribe through other means.

As a reminder, over at MSN Search, feed support web search results was added this week. More on that here: MSN Search Makes RSS Search Feeds Official.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:28 AM | Permalink

January 12, 2005

PubSub Unveils First "Content" Page

The gang over at PubSub have just released their first "content" page. Content pages (look for more of them in the future) feature one-click access to manually built queries on selected topics. This one features "subscription" links to track info about the actors, directors, films, and television programs nominated for Sunday's Golden Globe Awards. When I was working at George Washington University, we often constructed these types of pages to help students take full advantage of various databases, save them some time, and perhaps gently teach them a few search techniques.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:19 PM | Permalink

My MSN To Gain Feed Reading & Blog Search Features

John Battelle mentioned news that the My MSN service will gain feed reading features and blog search functions, and SiliconBeat provides even more details in MyMSN introduces RSS aggregation.

I've looked and seen no sign of the features yet. I did try the "Add Content" window with My MSN but couldn't find Search Engine Watch or a few other sites with RSS feeds listed. A search for RSS itself, however, did bring back 17 matches from major news sites, such as the Washington Post.

It sounds like the new blog search engine that MSN has promised may take over to provide better matches from across the web sometime this week. Moreover is cited in the SiliconBeat story as powering the blog search.

Yahoo already provides feed reading capabilities and a feed discovery service -- though a full-blown, dedicated blog search service there hasn't yet happened. As said, MSN has promised it would do this. If it materializes on the MSN Search site itself, it will be a new chapter for search engines.

Google's also promised long ago that a blog search service would emerge, but that has yet to materialize. My past post, MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search?, summarizes past promises and capabilities from all of them.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:21 AM | Permalink

More On Making Feed Discovery & Subscription Easier Yesterday, I wrote how Dave Winer was calling for more consistency in how people can find and subscribe to RSS, Atom and other feed content and illustrated some of the troubles I've personally seen with this. The issue has developed since his call.

RSS Subscription Central? from ClickZ looks again at Dave's idea with comments in particular from Feedster and Weblogs Inc.

Feedster's Scott Rafer doesn't favor centralizing things as Dave does but instead wants a cookie-based approach, while Jason Calacanis from Weblogs likes the idea that there might be multiple subscribe buttons to help him reach out to those with relationships with different news aggregators.

Meanwhile, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny comments on the idea, finding Winer's proposal complicated and instead wanting some type of helper add-on or browser enhancement that would work when someone clicks on a feed link.

"The fact is that you click on an orange XML button and the browser does the wrong thing," he writes.

In particular, he means that you can click on a feed link and see it in your browser -- but it will be a mess of marked up code. What you really want to do is get the link somehow into your aggregator or newsreader.

For me, this means that I right-click on a link, then it's added to my NewsGator reader that operates within Outlook. For a My Yahoo user, it means copying and pasting the URL into the system using the "Add RSS by URL" feature, if you don't find it instead by searching for it via the "Add Content" feature or by clicking on a site's "Add To My Yahoo" button.

(The Tips to Add Content to Your Page instructions at My Yahoo explain more about the first two options, and you can see how the "Add To My Yahoo" buttons work on our own feeds page.)

Let's Start With A Common Icon...

A good start on all of this is to come back to the most basic thing -- come up with a common icon that everyone can use, so that even the newest person looking for feed content will recognize that it is offered. Here's an email I got from someone today that underscores this problem:

I'm new to RSS. I'm not sure whether my question makes sense, but there are a lot of web sites which I constantly check that don't have a RSS feed function. How can I RSS read them?

My answer? There's no easy way to even know if a site has a feed option. As I illustrated yesterday, sometimes they do, but the link might not be visible, might not be on the home page and certainly may not be presented in any consistent manner.

Personally, I've relied on Yahoo has a way to find feed content when I can't readily identify if it is offered. I just wish this was even easier for people to tap into. My Yahoo, How About A Feed Search Tab? post explains this more.

Fagan Finder has a nice page that provides some other discovery options you can try: Finding RSS Feeds. But such tools won't work if a site lacks a feed at all. (Last year, Technorati found only 31 percent of blogs have feeds -- and I'm sure the percentage is far lower when you broaden the scope to web sites in general).

The nice myRSS service that helped in these cases, by creating feeds for sites that lacked them, has gone away. I'm certain there are some new ones but don't recall any offhand. Got suggestions -- fire them my way, and I'll do a follow-up post.

Back to the icon issue, I'm all for the orange XML icons that many have used. Even better to change that simply to say "Feed" instead of XML.

...And Link The Icon To A Explanatory Page

What happens when you click on the icon? How about a link to a page that explains what feeds you offer and how to subscribe. That solves the billions of icons problem. If someone like Jason Calacanis wants to have feed links and icons for various aggregators, putting these all on one page is much easier than trying to squeeze them onto your home page.

Similarly, if someone offers multiple feed options, having a page listing all of these gives you more room to work. It also offers you the ability to more fully explain how and what feeds are, to those new.

News.com has a great news feeds page like this. I liked the format and presentation so much that I modeled our own feeds page on it. Click on our XML icon within the main SEW site, and it's this main feeds page you are sent to.

Whether we get a further evolution to some centralized server to handle feed subscriptions, some cookie-based approach or whatever is a bigger issue that isn't going to be decided soon. But agreement over an icon and the idea that clicking on the icon leads to a page of feed instructions? That could happen pretty quickly.

Meanwhile, Dave says he's gotten some vendor interest on his idea and recreated his original post to a new location, where people can comment further.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:02 AM | Permalink

January 11, 2005

Problems Identifying Feed Links

Dave Winer posts today on the issue of finding a standard way to alert readers to the presence of a webfeed. Yeah, I agree -- what a pain that we have no standardization. I'm more amazed when I've gone to some prominent blogs that I simply cannot find their feeds anywhere. I end up going over to Yahoo, then doing a search because if it has found the feed address, it will list that below the page itself. Other times, there's just no consistency.

Here's a rundown of just a few of the blogs I read on a regular basis that show how it can be difficult to recognize when a feed is offered:

  • Anil Dash: In the middle of the page, you'll find the feed with this text: AtomEnabled (XML). Did you scroll to find it? Do you know Atom = feed?  
  • Boing Boing: Nice. Right at the top, easy to spot, is this link: rss. Only downside? If you don't know RSS = feed, then you might miss out.  
  • Dan Gillmor: I missed it initially, then finally spotted over in the right-hand column in small type: Syndicate this site (XML). Syndicate This Site? Sure, common wording for many blogs -- but bad wording. It's helpful only to those who understand that "syndicate" means I can take your feed and put it on my site. But a reader just wanting to read your feed? These words mean nothing -- especially to those who are new.  
  • Jason Kottke: Nothing I spotted on the home page was immediately obvious as a feed link. Following through to the About page, skimming that showed nothing obvious as well. On the Archive page, you do get a mention within a paragraph of info. So the feed is a click from the home page and not immediately recognizable.  
  • David Krane: Typical of what I find often with Blogger-based blogs, nothing obvious on the home page. I've looked and looked. Instead, to find the feed of this blog from one of Google's marketing chiefs, I had to go to rival search engine Yahoo, search for kraneland, then select the View as XML link that showed up under kraneland's listing. Thank you, Yahoo!

I grappled with what to do about highlighting feeds when we first started one for Search Engine Watch over a year ago. I went with using the little XML and RSS icons that I'd seen many other blogs use. Why both? To ensure even more recognition.

In addition, we now accompany them by a text link saying All Newsletters & Feeds in our left nav, which brings up a page showing all the feeds we offer. On the blog itself, there's also a separate listing for just the blog feed with both the icons and a Click For Blog Feed! link.

I certainly don't have the perfect solution. Like Dave, I simply wish there was some way that anyone with a feed could alert people that it is present. A standardized logo would help. I'd go with the word "Feed" as part of it to skip past the stupid RSS versus Atom debate. Since most feedreaders don't care the exact feed format, using the word Feed would be sufficient.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:35 AM | Permalink

January 10, 2005

Technorati Announces Winners of Contest

Shortly before the New Year holiday I posted that Feedster had announced the winners of their first developer contest.

The other day, Technorati announced the winners of their developer contest. More cool tools and apps to check out including Michael Dale's "Touchgraph Intergration" that will permit you to use the popular visualization software to look at Technorati results. A web version is coming soon.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:43 PM | Permalink

January 5, 2005

Findory and Technorati Offering New Services

The new year is beginning with new services from a couple of weblog and news search tools.

First, Technorati is now offering keyword alerts. Just enter a search strategy, hit the "Make this a Watchlist" link and add the url to your aggregator. Feedster, Bloglines, and Daypop all offer similar services. Additional details in this post from Technorati CEO, David Sifry.

Second, Findory has just introduced personalized RSS feeds based on keyword searches of their weblog and/or news databases. A Findory personalized feed will suggest new articles and postings based on YOUR reading history. This new service is in addition to the other personalized tools Findory makes available. Greg Linden, Findory's CEO, has instructions on how to get your personalized feeds running.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:36 PM | Permalink

January 4, 2005

Blogging: The Fortune Magazine Cover Story

Days after the release of a report about the weblog explosion in the U.S., blogs are part of the new Fortune magazine cover story. You can read the full text of the article: Why You Can't Ignore Bloggers online. The print version of the article includes pictures of several well-known bloggers on the cover and throughout the article.

The story focuses on blogs from the perspective of a business person (aka the typical Fortune reader):

Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they've become a force business can't afford to ignore.

and includes mentions or quotes from many well-known bloggers and weblog software providers including: + Robert Scoble (Scobelizer) + Xeni Jardin, (BoingBoing) Xeni's pic is also included in the web version. + Marissa Mayer and Jason Goldman (Google/Blogger) + Mena and Ben Trott (Six Apart)

Search tools Feedster and Technorati are also mentioned.

Note to Fortune: How about taking advantage of hypertext and creating links to the blogss and tools mentioned in the article?

Posted by Gary Price at 2:21 PM | Permalink

January 2, 2005

New Report, The State of Blogs in the U.S.

Since blogs, blogging, and RSS are popular topics of discussion for many people these days, including members of the search engine industry, the following "just released" report might be of interest to some of you.

"The State of Blogs" was released today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that reveals findings from two surveys. Here are a few fast facts. The full text of the report is available here.

+ 8 million American adults say they have created blogs + Blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users + 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators + 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs + 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is

Btw, some additional stats about RSS that might be of use. In late October, Rich Skrenta posted that RSS usage is at about 12% at Topix.net. Rich also said in October that just 7% of the 7000 sources Topix was crawling at that time offered RSS feeds. A member of the Waypath team reported in the SEW Forums that 63% of the weblogs they crawl have feeds; just 22% have full-text feeds.

Thanks to S.C. for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:03 PM | Permalink

December 29, 2004

Feedster Announces Winners of Developer Contest

Scott Johnson, VP of Engineering at Feedster, has just announced the winners of the Feedster developer contest. Lots o' interesting apps to check out including "RSS Zeitgeist." Here you can chart trends in the Feedster database. Intelliseek's BlogPulse offers a similar type of service.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:45 PM | Permalink

December 27, 2004

Waypath Debuts New Look and Service

Waypath, the blog search and discovery engine, is online today with a new look and new service.

First, the Waypath home page has a new look.

Second, the Seattle-based company has released "Blogs on the News." Find what the blogosphere is saying about a specific Yahoo News story. BOTN utilizes semantic matching analysis. You'll find blog comments even if the post doesn't link back to the underlying news story.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:33 PM | Permalink

December 24, 2004

Forbes on Feeds

More mainstream business press coverage of RSS and syndicated content in the Forbes article: Feed Me. The article says that RSS/synidcated could, "disrupt real web businesses." Feedster's Scott Rafer is quoted saying, "A lot of industries are worried." Other services mentioned include Technorati, Daypop, Topix.net, and MyYahoo. Forrester's Charlene Li mentions that more than 2 million receive feeds regularly.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:26 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2004

Technorati Plans Expansion into Japanese Market

Technorati's Founder and CEO David Sifry has announced that his weblog and "live web" search tool is planning to offer services in Japan sometime in 2005 via an arrangement with Digital Garage.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:19 PM | Permalink

December 9, 2004

Morerover Launches "Ping" Server

News aggregator Moreover has announced that a new Ping server is available to notify them when new content is published. Details here and here.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:17 PM | Permalink

Omidyar Invests in Feedster

The Omidyar Network (Pierre Omidyar, Founder and Chairman of the Board of eBay) has made an undisclosed investment in Feedster.

"We recognize that Feedster is fulfilling a need in the marketplace by delivering more relevant information from individual commentary, blogs, and edited news sources," said Doug Solomon, Vice President, Investments, Omidyar Network.

More in this news release.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:02 PM | Permalink

December 8, 2004

RSS Overview from Retuers

In the article: News and info junkies take new look at RSS, Lisa Baertlein provides an overview and some history about this syndication format. Several companies are mentioned including: + Moreover + Yahoo + Technorati + Feedburner + Pluck

"What's old is what's new again," said Jim Pitkow, president and CEO of Moreover.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:49 PM | Permalink

Blog-Safe Content Links To Come From HighBeam

Years ago, Dave Winer helped negotiate a system that allows bloggers to link to the full-text of New York Times articles and have those links work even after the article has been pulled back within the NYT's archives.

Now HighBeam is doing something similar, beta testing a "blog this document" feature so that bloggers can link into material that in some cases might otherwise require a subscription to access. Or at least, that seems the plan. A bit more on this via ClickZ: HighBeam Picks Locke for Blogging Initiative.

Want to try? Sign up for notification over here. And how to do that New York Times linking? I believe it's something built into those using the Radio Userland tool, and Aaron Schwartz has maintained a tool for others to use. It's easy and great -- just enter a URL, then you get a link back that brings up the full-text of the article.

FYI, I tried to reach that tool today and couldn't get through -- I suspect it's just a temporary problem.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:54 AM | Permalink

December 3, 2004

Bloglines Goes International

Bloglines, the popular web-based RSS aggregator and blog search tool has just released "international" versions of the service. You're now able to access Bloglines in six languages: + English + Spanish + Japanese + Chinese (Traditional) + French + German + Portuguese

Bloglines has also announced that their search engine is indexing more than 200 million articles. From the post, "It took us a year to reach 100 million, and less than 4 months for our blog and news feed content index to double."

Posted by Gary Price at 1:59 PM | Permalink

December 2, 2004

Feedster Makes "MSN Spaces Only" Search Available

Feedster is making a "specialized" interface available that searches ONLY MSN Spaces weblogs. Go to: http://spaces.feedster.com. You can read more about it on Scott Johnson's blog. You'll also read about the new host= limit at Feedster.

Thanks to S.C. for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:31 PM | Permalink

MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search?

MSN is now offering blogging space through its new MSN Spaces service, making it the third major portal to jump into this area. The first? Google, of course.

Google a portal? Sure, a stealth portal. It's got all the traditional portal features of email, search and free home pages -- or at least the successor to personal home pages, blogs. You just don't see them all displayed in a traditional portal format.

My Google Buys Blogging Company - But Why? article from Feb. 2003 looks at the issue of blogs as a portal feature and Google heading down that path. One of the predictions in it, which was obvious to many, was that once Google knocked over the blog domino, other portals would follow.

AOL launched its AOL Journals service in September 2003. Now with MSN in the space, that leaves just Yahoo among the majors.

Yahoo still has the GeoCities personal home pages service (valued at $3.6 billion when acquired in 1999 -- in contrast, Google likely paid only a few million for Blogger). But I'm sure we'll eventually see Yahoo gain a blogging system as well.

All this is great for those seeking to build blogs, though it has nothing to do with search. What none of the majors yet offer is an actual blog search service.

Yahoo is the closest now, making it at least possible to search to find blog feeds but not through actual blog entries. MSN has promised an actual blog search engine to come out later this year. Google's also said last year that a blog search would come, though it gave no timeline about when. Aside from the majors, we list a number of other blog search engines here.

For more details of the new MSN Spaces service, see this ClickZ article: MSN Enters Blogging Fray with "Spaces". And as an aside, Microsoft blogvangelist Robert Scoble says he's sticking with the Radio UserLand service and provides a wrap-up of reaction to the new Microsoft entry.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:15 PM | Permalink

Q&A With Technorati's David Sifry

Technorati is a great site for spying on what people are saying about a particular web page or blog entry. In Tracking the net, Red Herring does a Q&A with founder David Sifry about ego searches, developing the service and surviving among the Googles and Yahoos of the search world. Thanks to Search Engine Guide for tip!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:02 PM | Permalink

November 8, 2004

Feedster Launches Developer Network

It's a busy time at Feedster these days.

+ Over the weekend we told you about their new "blog" only search option.

+ Two weeks ago we blogged about the launch of FeedsterHacks.com.

Today, Scott Johnson (VP of Engineering) posts about the new Feedster Developer Network. To get the FDN rolling, they're having a contest for the developer community to create new applications and uses of the Feedster technology in 11 categories. Winners get IPods.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 7, 2004

New Stuff From Feedster and Technorati

A couple of items from two of the primary players in the world of RSS and weblog search.

+ The Merc's Michael Bazeley let's us know that Feedster has just unveiled a "blogs-only feed search."

Feedster CEO Scott Rafer told Bazeley, that so much non-blog information is now syndicated through XML feeds that it's becoming harder to hone in on purely blogosphere buzz or info.

+++

+ Technorati's CEO, David Sifry, writes about several new features and enhancements to Technorati.

Here are a couple of things that caught my eye.

+ Redesigned home page + Much faster indexing: most posts are available minutes after creation + A new advanced search query language Boolean, nested searching, and date range searching. Note: When I went looking for more info about the new advanced search options, I was unable to find it. + More data indexed "We currently index posts that are up to about a month old, and we're going further and further back in our post archives every day, with the goal being to have almost 2 years of posts indexed soon."

Posted by Gary Price at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 5, 2004

An Hourly Visualization of the News

Here's a new and cool info visualization tool (it requires Flash) that we just learned about (thanks J.G.) that comes from Jonathan Harris, the developer of WordCount.org.

The site is called 10x10 and offers an hour by hour "postcard" (updated hourly) based on the 100 most "important" words culled from three RSS news feeds. The feeds come from: + Reuters World News + BBC World Edition + New York Times International News

Here's how Harris describes 10x10, "Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other."

10x10's word lists and postcards are built without any human intervention.

Links to archived hourly snapshots and word lists are available (look for the links directly below each snapshot).

More 10x10 user info here and developer info here.

Want more info visualization tools? This SEW Blog post lists several including Smart Money's Market Maps (visualize the stock market) and a tool from anacubis to visualize material from Hoover's.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 28, 2004

Feedster Hacks Launches

After I blogged about the launch of the new Feedster Support Blog yesterday, I learned about another new blog called, Feedster Hacks. An RSS feed is also available.

What's it all about?

Feedster Hacks is a new clearinghouse blog run by Steven M. Cohen (he's a librarian and someone I work with at ResourceShelf) that collects and organizes, "the various hacks that have been created with Feedster." Now, what does Steven consider a hack? He writes, "A hack can include a bookmarklet, an advanced search mechanism, or even a useful way of using Feedster to fit your RSS/weblog searching needs."

Feedster Hacks isn't an "official" company site. However, it's being with the approval of Feedster.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogs as Search Marketing Tools

Most blogs are simply convenient self-publishing tools, providing authors with an easy way to reach a relatively limited audience of readers. But blogs are increasingly attracting attention from search engines, and with a bit of creativity, can become an integral part of an overall search marketing campaign.

In today's SearchDay article, Web Feeds, Blogs & Search Engines, guest writer Mike Rende covers a recent Search Engine Strategies panel that focused on the increasingly important interaction between content syndication via blogs and search engines, and how it's changing the way we find and consume information.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 27, 2004

Just Ask: The Feedster Support Blog is Now Online

Scott J. informs us that Feedster has just launched a "support blog" that's, "dedicated to answer questions about Feedster emailed to feedstersupport@feedster.com." An ATOM feed is also available.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 22, 2004

Blabble Launches Blog Engine

Blabble, a company that offers intelligence mined from weblogs (a fee-based service), has just released a free blog search engine. The results are very basic and not all that wonderful at the moment (especially compared with other blog engines) but Blabble's founder Matt Rice says that the free service will soon include aggregations/thoughts/sentences mined from the content. We will be watching. You can learn more about what Blabble is up to in this Internet Retailer article from August.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 8, 2004

E-Mail Alerts at Feedster, RSS Feeds at Yahoo

+ Scott Johnson has let everyone know that Feedster's E-Mail search alerts are finally working correctly. He even thanks me for the motivation to fix the problem. You're MORE than welcome Scott and thanks for listening.

+ Earlier this week I mentioned that Yahoo News would soon be adding an XML button on all news search results pages that allows you to add an RSS search results feed to ANY aggregator. As of today, this service is working. Of course, you can also add the feed to your My Yahoo page with just one click. Previously, you had to use the tool on Jeremy Zawdony's site (it remains available) to create a Yahoo News RSS feeds.

Btw, Speaking of Yahoo and RSS... Dan Rosenweig, Yahoo's COO, said yesterday that the company will introduce advertising into RSS feeds. You can learn more about it in the eWeek article: Yahoo Readies Ads for RSS.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 7, 2004

IceRocket Launches Blog Search

IceRocket, the new search engine that investor Mark Cuban calls his "toy" now offers weblog search. Loren over at Search Engine Journal has the details along with an interview with IceRocket CEO, Blake Rhodes.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 3, 2004

How Much RSS?

For your stats folder.

A post on the Topix.net blog lets us know that the amount of RSS content from news organizations is not as great as some might believe.

Rich Skrenta reports that of the 7000+ news sources Topix crawls only 7% have feeds. He goes on to say that even if the site has a feed, Topix usually crawls the HTML content.

"Even for sites which offer feeds, we'll generally continue to crawl the human-readable version. We've seen sites where the RSS broke but no one at the paper seemed to notice, or cases where the RSS was out of sync with the human-viewable web content."

What about search tools that focus on weblog content?

About a month ago a member of the Waypath team posted some stats in the SEW Forums.

It contained the following numbers: + Only 63% of the weblogs Waypath crawls have feeds; only 22% have full-text in their feeds.

These Waypath numbers were a bit surprising to me. I was thinking that the penetration of RSS/XML feeds in the blogosphere was greater especially when it comes to blogs offering full text feeds.

>From the searcher perspective it's worth remembering that an RSS search might not be the same thing as a full text search.

Thanks to G.L. for the news tip.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 30, 2004

Feedster Does Job Search

New search services tools are coming fast and furious these days.

Feedster is testing a searchable database of job openings culled from thousands of RSS/ATOM feeds. Listings can be viewed online or sent directly to your aggregator.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

Feedster Providing Content to New IDG Product Guide

The new IT Product Guide on InfoWorld.com includes news and weblog content via the Feedster database. A bit more in this news release.

co

Posted by Gary Price at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 28, 2004

Bloglines and RSS Bandwidth Problems

A busy day in the RSS world.

First, the removal of the beta moniker to the RSS/ATOM section on My Yahoo along with a searchable directory of feeds.

Second, news that Bloglines has released new tools (open API, Web Services) to help with RSS bandwidth issue which has been in the news recently. You can find more details in this news release and eWeek story

Posted by Gary Price at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yahoo, How About A Feed Search Tab?

I've only begun to play with the new My Yahoo Beta that Gary blogged about earlier. I was excited that it was now possible to easily search for just web feeds, rather than having to do an entire web search and hope that feeds might also show up in association with a web page listing. But man, what a pain to get to this.

When you're in your My Yahoo page, you need to click on the Add Content button you'll see just below the search box. That brings you to an entirely new box where you can search for just web feed content. Below that box is also a browsable directory of feeds. Alternatively, you can jump directly to the page via this link: My Yahoo! - Add Content.

Now how about making web feed search its own tab, similar to the others listed on Yahoo's pure search interface? You can use advanced search to narrow your query to just RSS/XML content, but it's not as nice as the new feed search and directory offered from within My Yahoo.

By the way, New Beta Version of My Yahoo! is a good rundown from Yahoo itself about the new features, on its blog. Jeremy Zawodny, who works for Yahoo and a big feed advocate there, provides his own take here: New My Yahoo Beta, Featuring RSS and Atom.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread: NEW: MyYahoo! Beta Upgrade.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 25, 2004

Ads Are Part of New Moreover RSS Service

Advertising continues to move into RSS world.

This news release along with a News.com story alerts us to a new and free service from Moreover that offers aggregated "topic" news feeds coupled with a contextually based advertisement. One ad per day is included with each feed.

Ads are supplied by Kanoodle.

Feedster recently began placing ads some of their feeds.

Here's a complete list of RSS feeds that Moreover is making available with this new service.

Another service, Moreover's FeedDirect offers free RSS news feeds for non-commercial sites that also include contextual text advertising from Google.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 23, 2004

Profile On Bloglines Feed Aggregator

Nice, short profile from the San Jose Mercury News of the Bloglines news aggregator service: Bloglines aims for simplicity. Greg Linden also has a nice summary of why he likes Bloglines just out: Bloglines and feed readers.

There are plenty of other services like Bloglines, of course. We list a number of these here: RSS News Feeds & Blog Search Engines. And if we don't have it, Fagan Finder probably will: Fagan Finder: Weblogs, Journals, & RSS.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 22, 2004

RSS Digest Lets You Insert Feeds On Your Page

The new tool RSS Digest that I heard about via a review at Tara's blog lets you easily create JavaScript to place feed content into your web pages. For example, if you wanted to run headlines from our Search Engine Watch Blog, you'd simply copy-and-paste this code into your page:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.bigbold.com/digest/ ?key=uQHJ2UCefDCJa4fw5SJaRg&format=J <aLTa>B&max_items=10&cache_time=90"> </script>

Then a list of our posts would automatically be updated on your site, like this:

So what are you waiting for? Copy that code and paste! Or visit the site to generate code for feed you want to use.

Another good tool like this is Feed2JS. And I know there are plenty more. Gary tells me Findory Inline news is a great way to collect a number of feeds and post them inline. He's got a rundown here.

Contribute your favorites to a new thread I've started at our forums: RSS/Atom/Feed Display Tools.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 21, 2004

Don't Forget Findory

In his recent post about the My Jeeves, Danny correctly points out the differences between AJ and a9 allowing you to save, store, and search your personal results and tools like Eurekester that offer the user the chance to personalize or "reshape" their results.

Another company doing work with "personalized" content is Seattle-based Findory. Greg Linden and his team offer a product that delivers personalized pages (the service offers a search option) of news based on your past clicking and reading behavior. You can also have a personalized newspaper delivered via email. Findory technology powers Blogory which offers the same type of thing for weblog content. Blogory also offers an "adaptive" RSS feed.

In June, Chris provided an overview of Findory in this SearchDay article.

Finally, make sure to take a look at this blog post where Greg Linden offers his take on the differences between customization and personalization. I find them very useful.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 20, 2004

"Blogjams", RSS, and Personalized Search

Software programs called RSS readers creating a blog jamSource: Seattle Times

In an article about the spike in trafic many sites are see due to RSS feeds, Findory and Blogory CEO Greg Linden is quoted.

From the article, "Seattle-based Findory.com is offering what Chief Executive Greg Linden says is the next-generation RSS reader. The Web-based service, called Blogory, collects RSS feeds into a massive pool and sends its users individual snippets to read, based on the history of what they've read. Users don't have to subscribe to individual feeds. RSS feeds are popular with early adopters and news junkies, Linden said, but the technology may not become as widely used as some have predicted. 'Other people don't really have the time to set up an RSS reader, hunt down these feeds and copy and paste (them) into a reader, which is exactly the problem that Findory is trying to solve,' he said.

Yes, Linden is promoting his company with the quote. However, I think he might be correct about RSS (as we know it today) not becoming as popular with the mainstream as some predict for precisely the reason he mentions. Stay tuned.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 30, 2004

What's This? A Search Engine Watch Blog?

That's right, kind reader -- you've stumbled into the alpha test of our new Search Engine Watch Blog. We're telling everyone about it on September 16 in more detail, but feel free to play with what we're testing.

UPDATE: News of our public launch is here: Welcome To The Search Engine Watch Blog

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See More Posts From:

This Week | This Month

  var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-564586-7"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".searchenginewatch.com"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); window.collarity_appid = "incmedia"; //> //>
Top Jobs
more Jobs

Account Manager
Varick Media Management New York, United States

Reporting and Data Analyst
Varick Media Management New York, United States

Director of Marketing Communications
Avery Dennison Brea, United States

Publisher
Confidential Leading Publisher New York, United States

White Papers
more Research

0