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?
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