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. No one wants an arthritic search engine after all. 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. (I had reported in first week of September that this would be live by the time of playoffs. Well, almost.)
The Yahoo blog search is married to the Yahoo News Search and unless you look for the “blog sidebar” hard enough you are very likely to miss it. You really have to search for it. In case you think I am being unusually cruel and ungallant, well, try it yourself. The user interface is like water torture. Why, a company as fine as Yahoo, launches a supremely elegant podcast effort in the morning, only to give us a blog search tool that reminds you of the Baby-episode of Seinfeld. (Episode 85, in case you were wondering.) Yahoo’s excuse would be that their blog search is still in beta, and it would improve over time. Which makes me wonder: have we gone too far with this beta madness?
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.” I was fairly satisfied with the links the search engine brought up. Here, I feel a missed opportunity - they are using the same “RSS/Blog Search” mechanism in their search service, that mimics most of the older players. It doesn’t provide any relevance, or context. (Perhaps that is why I think you folks are going to like Sphere.) Having seen the search of most of the other vendors, including Google, Yahoo should have done a genre defining product, that broke new ground. In that regard, I find it lacking.
8 comments so far
10:51 PM PT
It’s awful, it’s ugly, it’s unusable, and it should be embarrassing for them. Damn, just when I was starting to like Yahoo.
11:00 PM PT
Om, thanks for the kind words about Technorati. We’ve been making a lot of speed and usability improvements over the past month or so, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments - perhaps even bring you in to see some of the new stuff we’re working on. You up for it?
Dave
11:03 PM PT
anytime dave, do let me know when works, and we can make it happen. hope you continue to make them improvements. we need them
11:34 PM PT
Dave - The Technorati speed is fantastic now, thanks so much for your hard work.
2:25 AM PT
Yahoo releases an integrated blog search - sort of
Yahoos release of its own blog search was expected to follow Googles, and it is now up and running. Kinda. Yahoo has made the choice to differentiate itself by trying to bring blogs to the masses, essentially mixing blog search results with news articl…
5:15 AM PT
Yahoo’s New Blog Search Tool…Lame
According to Dictionary.com, the word “underwhelming” means “to fail to excite, stimulate, or impress”. Well, you might as well add the logo for Yahoo’s new blog search tool - and Google’s RSS
reader - along side the definition. Yahoo quietly la…
3:29 PM PT
[...] A recent post we and others (here, here, here and here) made about Sphere - a new blog search engine based on initiation by Om Malik is an interesting example. Om, has new thoughts on yahoo blog search engine and how Sphere is better. Some readers would have noticed del.icio.us count at the bottom in our previous post. What was 3 then is now 47! Moreover it is (was) widely discussed on the blogosphere. [...]
3:35 PM PT
[...] Earlier this week, Yahoo launched a new blog search feature. It is integrated into their news search area and the blog search results show up to the right of news search results from mainstream media. So now your blog posts will be right there next to the big guys. Some people, like Om Malik, are less than impressed with Yahoo’s attempt at entering the blog search arena. Here’s Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny’s take on the whole thing as well as some other reactions from bloggers. [...]
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