How to find a blog
In “New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs,” the Wall Street Journal tries to guess which company will become the Google of blogs (article freely available). Several companies are already well known, such as Technorati or Bloglines. But like it is quite difficult to compare the results from Web search engines, this is the same for blog-search sites, and for the same reasons: the number of indexed blogs is very different from a site to another, and the algorithms also are very different.
Here is an excerpt from the article of the Wall Street Journal.
For those who want just a small taste of what prominent bloggers are saying, DayPop is a good place to go. It culls its search results from fewer than 60,000 blogs chosen by editors. That means it’s likely to offer up relatively few links to well-known bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Dan Gillmor. Sites like Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket and BlogPulse scour far more blogs — between 15 million and 20 million each — so searches on those sites deliver far more results, often from obscure sources. While Technorati and BlogPulse focus exclusively on blogs, other sites — Feedster and IceRocket included — offer the option to bring in mainstream news sources.
After adding Bloglines to the above list, I started two specific searches, the first on my name, “piquepaille.” Here are the number of results given by these blog-search engines: Bloglines (66), BlogPulse (296), DayPop (21), Feedster (201), IceRocket (404) and Technorati (683).
Then I tried to know how many blogs have mentioned the new game console from Sony. Here are the number of results for “sony psp”: Bloglines (635), BlogPulse (21,217), DayPop (363), Feedster (32,085), IceRocket (35,913) and Technorati (36,096).
Anyway, like with Google, you almost will only look to the first ten or twenty results. So all these blog-search sites are probably good enough to satisfy your curiosity.
Now here the last paragraph of the Wall Street Journal about the audience of these blog-search services.
The new blog-search sites draw only a sliver of the visitors that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN do. Most of them didn’t have enough traffic in July to register on the radar of Internet-tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Technorati did, with 642,000 unique visitors. But its traffic still made up less than 1% of Google’s visitors that month.
Not only Google has more traffic, but it also gives much more results: 364,000 pour “piquepaille” and 32,600,000 pour “sony psp” (13,800,000 for a search of these two words between quotes). As the number of sites really accessible from a Google search is still limited to 999, these huge numbers are not very important.
