Scobleizer is right

Scobleizer discusses the numerous blog search tools, and how none of them are really what we need

I can just hear everyone saying “huh? I thought Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket, Bloglines, and Pubsub, among others, are doing time-based search?” Yes, but they all are unsatisfactory. Why? Well, for one, they’ll never have the traffic of MSN Search, Yahoo, or Google.

I will agree that they will not all have the traffic of MSN Search, Yahoo, or Google, but that just affects how many will use the engines. I believe that the problem that Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket, Bloglines, and Pubsub, etc. has is how quickly do they learn of a new post. There are a large number of sites blogs can ping (see this, this, this) when they generate a new post, and it is these pings that cause a blog search tool to know that it should index a blog, or they need to be reading every RSS feed, and then they are limited by what is included in the feed, and how often it is posted.

Most of the “normal” people around me never will use a search engine other than these three. Heck, most of the people in the world have never even clicked on “advanced search” and you’re gonna try to get them to visit something like http://blogsearch.google.com? Yeah, right. But, before I dive into the state of time-based search today, 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.... Now, what do you get on all of these blog search engines? LOTS of time-based lists of blogs. But, is this useful either? No. No. No. Why? Cause I don’t know where to start. I don’t know the reputation of any of these results. I don’t know which ones are being linked to, which ones are being viewed, which ones write about Apple a lot, or which ones are people who never write about Apple except for today. There’s no context. No help for me to figure out what’s going on. At least Technorati shows me inbound links (but you don’t know what those inbound links were for

Precisely. Many of those links may be because a blog is on some other blog's blogroll, or that some other post was found very useful to other bloggers, but what you really want to know is how many blogs are linking to that particular post.

— what if they were all for a Paris Hilton video that that blog had on it, would that blogger be as interesting for you to read about Apple as, say, Engadget or an Apple-focused blog?.... What do I want? An engine that mixes both time-based searching with relevancy. How can the engines do it? Well, they should study Mary Hodder’s “social gestures” writings very closely. Mary, I wish Mary would be in charge of building a new kind of search engine. I hope MSN listens to her, she’s done the best thinking on this topic I’ve seen (and her ideas come out of real user research). Anyway, what would you like to see in blog search? Time-based search?