IP Democracy: Om Malik on Blog Search

In the wake of Yahoo’s launch of a blog search function, Om Malik has some interesting comments on Yahoo’s move and the state of blog search tools in general:

Technorati, one of the early entrants in the blog search arena has been beaten black and blue by blogosphere’s cognoscenti. Many of their complaints have been fair and justified…Despite all the criticism heaped on them, I have not seen anyone come up with a better solution. Icerocket is not much of an improvement, and neither are offerings from Google. Say what you may about Technorati, but at least it has a usable interface. Today, Yahoo launched its blog search tool, which has managed to confound and confuse.

Though, Yahoo does perform admirably as a blog search engine. It helps you find a lot of results on a specific query, and while they are not as numerous as say technorati, they are “on topic.”

In a post written two days before the Yahoo blog search release, Om says “[t]he big issue [with blog search] is finding relevant and intelligent blog posts on a specific topic, that are based on authority. The authority is not an arbitrary decision of a human community, but a ‘collective effort.’ Noting that “Google tries to do this in its new Reader by restricting ‘google search’ to RSS feeds [, b]ut that’s not the answer,” Om recommends that his readers “take a look at Sphere, a stealth mode start-up that has developed some interesting algorithms to solve this problem.”

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on October 11, 2005 10:32 AM to IP Democracy