The case for blog search engine
I see more and more people raising the questing about the need for blog search engine, especially when Google is doing such a great job finding good content from blog as well as from web sites. It seems like that Google itslef is not investing too much in their blog search too. So, in this post I will explain what I think should be the duties of a blog search engine and why I still see a need for one.
Blog search engines (should) serve multiple purposes
- Finding great bloggers, blogs and blog posts
- Recognizing great bloggers, blogs and blog posts – rank.
- Categorizing blogs and bloggers in multiple ways not limited to content type. Categorize blogs by their objectives: personal blogging is not the same as corporate blog or professional bloggers, subject expert, politics, go green, artist or others. It is not just about what that the blogger writes about but also about what the blogger is trying to achieve.
- Monitoring blog and blogger progress – is this blog alive? a shooting star?
- Web-now – see Twitter Search Trending Topics, Twingly’s Hot right now or Technorati’s what’s percolating in blogs now
- Alerts – a list of new blogs in a given category that are doing well
- Community building – increasing cooperation among bloggers (e.g. you should read this blog)
What do we need to know?
- The top bloggers in a category
- The top blogs in a category
- The top blog post in a category
Who needs it?
- The readers – to know what to read, what is going on in real-time
- The blogger
- To present a case to a sponsor
- To know whom to look up to
- To see and share about the blogger progress
- The business
- To know where to buy ad real-estate or whom to sponsor
- PR – where to spend my effort effectively
The challenges of blog search engines today.
Using the reaction counting method for ranking, the service needs to distil humans actions from automated (bots) one in order to be accurate. So far this is not working well and adds another questions mark around the validity of blog search engines.
Here are some example for both:
- Human reactions
- Blog post reacting to another
- Update on Twitter or Jaiku
- Digging on Digg
- Submitting to social bookmarking site
- Posting on a social network
- Bloggers community
- Bot reactions
- Splog (spam blog) – copycats
- Related articles by Zemanta
The number of sites that offer posting of human blog reactions is growing faster than the crawling capabilities and sometime does not offer access to crawlers.
The service should also remove the “me” links from the count i.e. links from all the social object under the same owner.
A couple of thoughts
Maybe someone could think about another way to rank blogs and bloggers. Measuring traffic is probably a more accurate way (Alexa). The traffic is relative to the category. I assume that a blog about Technology will get more traffic than a blog about biology. The rank should be within a category and not across all (or not just across all blogs).
In my opinion there is a need for blog/blogger search engine but the emphasize of the search capability should be less around finding content (leave that to Google) and more about discovering leading blogs and bloggers.
It does not need to be a free service at least not for the business. The premium or a sponsor account model could work as well.
Webnomena 
What do we need to know?
* The top bloggers in a category
* The top blogs in a category
* The top blog post in a category
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Who ranks them? Is there any objective criteria? is the demand (hits) the only criteria? Do the best blogs have the most hits? Are porno blogs the best?
O. Braga
Thanks for your response and very good question.
Who rank them? One of the existing blog search engines like Twingly or Technorati or a new service.
Is there any objective criteria? In my opinion I think that one should have an objective in mind when searching. For instance if I’m a business my objective is to know who is the best that can help my organization with information or to spread my message. When I search I have a task to accomplish, and if the service can be more aligned with my objectives, then I can achieve it quicker with higher chance of success.
Is the demand (hits) the only criteria? Not sure, I only suggest to rank them within a category. I also pointed out in this post some of the challenges to rank them using inbound links. I do think that trafic count. Any suggestions?
Do the best blogs have the most hits? I believe so, within a criteria and relative to a criteria. This is exactly the purpose of this blog post. If you rate all blogs as if they all belong to the same criteria you’ll end up with a list of top blogs concentrated to few subject that interest most people. It will not help to understand within a certain domain who is the best. In most of the times you’ll see politic and technology at the top. It is meaningless to compare political with technology blog, don’t you think?
Are porno blogs the best? If there are any porno blogs (are they any?) and they get the most traffic then if they will be categorized as I suggest, you’ll be able to know which blog is the best in the porno blogging industry. As it is today you’ll only see that porno blog are at the top ahead of political and technology blogs.
Keren
Thks!