Mirror mirror on the wall, which blog search is best of them all? – asks Robert Scoble. My answer is very simple:
Technorati has by far more features, they continue to be the innovation leader. It is because of these features that I force myself to use Technorati, day by day – but it’s a painful experience (despite availability graphs Dave Sifry likes to quote).
Google Blog Search has one very convincing “feature”: it works. Always. And fast.
When I say fast, I mean the speed of accessing data: it’s instantaneous, vs. the looooong wait for Technorati. How fast the two engines index new blog posts is a different matter – but to me it’s secondary. Scoble’s example clearly shows Technorati as winner:
Technorati for videobloggingweek2007. 147 results.
Google Blog Search for videobloggingweek2007. 76 results.
However, checking those very same links after a while shows:
Technorati for videobloggingweek2007. 183 results.
Google Blog Search for videobloggingweek2007. 209 results.
Google is known to quietly add features without major announcements. The “biggie” to me is that Google Blog Search now finds comments left on any blog. Everybody says blogging is a conversation, yet half the conversation has been impossible to find so far. CoComment, co.mments are nice tools, but blog search engines have largely ignored comments until now. I’d say this is the first feature showing Google “out-innovate” Technorati.
I’m not sure Technorati cares a lot about head-to-head comparisons. After all, they no longer want to be the blog search company – they aim to become a media company.
Update (4/3): TechCrunch thinks Technorati’s doing a mating dance. Since I repeatedly called for a White Knight to acquire Technorati, I’d be quite happy to see this mating dance work…
Actually, you have to dig a little deeper:
Currently (8:18am PDT April 3, 2007):
http://www.technorati.com/search/videobloggingweek2007?authority=n&start=180
shows 193 results.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=videobloggingweek2007&scoring=d&sa=N&start=90
Shows 94 results (really only 86, as Google says “Results 81 – 86 of about 94”)
Hope that help. I suggest attempting to click through deep into the results – you’ll often get a more accurate look at how many results are actually there, as opposed to the estimates that many search engines provide.
Dave
Google’s numbers appear to be scr***d. But that’s somewhat beyond the point anyway. I’ve always recognized Technorati as the innvation leader. There is a reason I keep on focring myself to use Technorati, and that reason is the superior features / filtering ..etc. But it is a frustrating experience, and this morning was no different, having timed out just accessing the main technorati.com page. Charts or not to show otherwise, this is my experience and it never happens with Google.
Now, the one exception to Technorati’s superioriry in features: comment search. This is big, and Google now provides it, while you don’t. I hope you won’t let them get away with this for long 🙂
Zoli,
Near as ew can tell, Google is indexing all the RSS feeds it can see from a blog, which often includes comment feeds (for blogs that have comment feeds). We looked at that and decided that those feeds were, on the whole, really spammy.
But I’m always open to revisiting that decision. In what way do you find that the comment results on Google helpful? Do you find them spammy, or non-spammy? What are some searches that you do where you find the results from comments useful?
Thanks again for your great feedback. I really appreciate it, especially all the constructive feedback on how we can get better!
Dave
Dave, I haven’t really checked enough to know how spammy they are.
It helps me in two ways: keyword / expression search, where sometimes other people say smart things NOT on their own blogs but in comments.
The other way is keeping track of myself: when I comment somewhere, forget to set co.mments and later the subject comes up again.. I remember I was part of a relevant comment thread somewhere, just don’t know where:-)
One way for me to filter out splogs is toe set “some authority” vs. “any”. This is one of the reasons I am still using Technorati, vs. Google. Sadly, as of a few weeks, it no longer remembers my default setting:-(