Blog Search

Blogspotting (a blog at Business Week that looks at the intersection of blogging and business) reports The CEO of Bloglines (now a division of AskJeeves) says that his company will release a blog search engine this summer which will surpass the likes of Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub. "The challenge," he says, "is to create world-class blog search, which we don't think exists now."

Of course, lots of companies, big and small, are chasing that vision. Fletcher says that with improved search, Bloglines will lead users to the relevant blogs, and then help them organize all the feeds pouring onto their desktop. He sees the technology automatically grouping the feeds, or perhaps ranking them according to the user's interests (as documented by clicks).

Jack Krupansky commented The ad thing is a big unknown, coupled with the business model. I use Bloglines and I have my own blogs; I'm not paying anything on either end. Google is now beta-testing AdSense ads that eventually I can put into my blogs and that users of Bloglines (and other aggregators) will then see. That will let me make a little money, but where's Bloglines going to monetize their infrastructure and services?

I just hope they don't think they can drop any little "surprises" on either publishers or subscribers without significant repercussions. Maybe they'll just put ads below the web feed publisher's AdSense ads. Meanwhile, we'll al be waiting for those shoes to drop.

I'm not convinced of the merits of a distinct "blog search engine". I just use Google and stick the word "blog" after my search terms and get plenty of interesting blog results. Maybe you guys at BW could prepare the case for how business users can get *significant* business value from blog search engines.

Greg commented How they will filter and rank blogs in the search engine will be key to how useful it is. You did mention using clicks as a way to rank blogs or blog entries. Does that mean they will weight blog posts with clicks instead of say incoming links or number of subscribers? Will they use tags? It would be interesting to find out more about this.

Hat Tip to http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/05/big_plans_for_b.htmlMicro Persuasion

Brian Oberkirch blogged This synopsis/a> of an interview with the CEO of Bloglines is interesting for a few reasons -- one, the goal of creating a Google equivalent for blogs. Real-time comprehensive search is a need for Web 2.0 info management, and we're just starting down that path with current tools.

More interesting, though, is that the writer, Steven Baker, posts up his raw notes and says, have a look and let me know if I missed anything that you find interesting. I love this approach & will be following what Steven does all that much more closely as a result.

I also commend Steven Baker for posting his raw notes for people to review to see if he missed anything we find interesting.