Comments on: Yahoo Kills Blog Search?

By: Jennifer Fader

Jennifer Fader — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 23:41:31 +0000

I think there is a very specific audience for blog search. The blog "news cycle" is reduced to minutes for those who use the blogosphere, or live in it. That's why techorati has real time tools like technorati mini. The cycle of info is much much faster there. So to put blog posts in a general search buckets doesn't do a lot for usability.

By: StefanM

StefanM — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 07:49:14 +0000

I am also very dissapointed with the search results of many of my searches, since the top search results are blogs or forums, most of which do not have the relevant info concerning the keywords I searched for. Google rules in this blog search, but it would be really nice to continue to have the competition from Yahoo. Even if this post here is about reminding us of a yahoo blog search, I think it's good.. so that we should know… :)

By: IT Blogwatch

IT Blogwatch — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 10:34:16 +0000

RFID…

There's an international flavor to today's IT Blogwatch, in which English local governments are accused of spying on citizens and their trash. Not to mention the world's coolest USB hubs…

By: Ashish Sinha

Ashish Sinha — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 04:28:19 +0000

I don't understand why so much of hoopla over this. Yahoo still is searching Blogs..so what's the big deal? By putting such news on internet, one if promoting stupidity.. Ashish iDea Labs

By: Yaniv Golan

Yaniv Golan — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 15:06:33 +0000

I use blogsearch in the sense that I subscribe to feeds originating from Technorati and Google blog search results. It's useful to keep up with what's happening right now on a specific topic.

Unfortunately Google does not allow me to subscribe to a general purpose search results (other then through email alerts). If it did, I am not sure I would differentiate between results coming from blogs vs. other sources.

I also go to the various blogsearches for very specific research purposes.

But when I search, 99% of the time it's just standard search.

"blogsearch" would be useful as a feature - checkbox - on the general purpose search. I am not sure it deserves a specific niche in the long run.

By: Don Dodge

Don Dodge — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 14:42:25 +0000

This makes sense to me. News Search is for news. There are lots of specialized search indexes for things like job search, people search, product search, mobile search, video search, etc. Why put blog results in News Search?

The funny thing is that Yahoo still has some blog results in its News index. For example, Search Engine Roundtable, a blog, shows up in a Yahoo News Search query for "Yahoo Search". Results from Gawker blogs also show up in queries. So, maybe the more accurate statement is that Yahoo has removed most blog results from it's News Search index.

Google does the same thing, including a result from blog.searchenginewatch.com, …clearly a blog. MSN Search returned pure news results as far as I could tell.

Don Dodge http://dondodge.typepad.com/thenextbigthing/2006/08/yahooblog_sear.html

By: Martin Geddes

Martin Geddes — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 12:04:17 +0000

I find myself wanting to "search by voice": commercial or personal. That means aggregating blogs, some wikis, personal homepages, and forums into the "personal" category. Narrowing to blogs alone is rarely productive.

The real value of blog search is in tagged content, not keyword search. My feeds for articles tagged "ims" keeps me fully up to date with that subject area with minimal effort.

By: weaverluke

weaverluke — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 09:45:46 +0000

One drawback with e.g. Technorati is much the same as with Google: it focuses on general/global, rather than personal relevance, and therefore very much lives up to its name in skewing results massively towards the A-listers.

You won't readily find my blog if you search on "digital identity" on Technorati, even though I write on that subject a good deal—hopefully some of it worth reading if you're into that subject—and have had a few tens of incoming links from A/B-list blogs over the last couple of years. But unless your incoming links are fresh (last month or so), you rapidly drop out of sight in the blogosphere.

Personally, I rely on recommendations by the 52 bloggers I read regularly (thanks guys!) to discover personally-relevant stuff mostly, but if I am searching on a "global" topic like "useage statistics for MySpace", both Google and Technorati can prove very useful.

weaverluke

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 05:59:53 +0000

JZ, thanks for the confirmation of the news. appreciate that.

By: abhijit

abhijit — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 05:54:03 +0000

I do actually.

Since blogs have become my main tech news source, I always try for blog searches first.

However, the biggest headache in the general search results from both Google and Yahoo is the huge number of results for prouduct sales. I wish there was some way this could be separated out, so that I can get to the relevant results faster.

By: Deepak

Deepak — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 05:46:37 +0000

I don't really use blog search per se. Google is still the place I look first, and if the first result is a blog, very well, especially since some of the best information is in the blogosphere. I do find that the only time I use Technorati is when I when I want to see more recent results, but usually I am interested in contextual results. To track meme's I find Sphere sometimes gets me better results. For research its still Google + del.icio.us/Diigo.

The ideal scenario would be a source agnostic search (or a suitably weighted algorithm) which has aggregation/clustering capabilities around sources and/or time. At least for me

By: Jeremy Zawodny

Jeremy Zawodny — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 05:40:09 +0000

"Did Yahoo kill their blog search service?"

Yes, we did.

I suggested we blog about it, but sadly that didn't happen.