Finding the A-List Bloggers

For proof, simply type in the subject of a breaking news story, such as "French riots," into a traditional search engine. The first items that pop up probably won't reflect the last November's racial/religious riots in France. In a decent blog search engine, typing in the same term will pull up almost exclusively news stories and other material relevant to the recent turmoil.

Why?

Traditional search engines only spider sites every one day to a few weeks, so they don't reflect the latest postings. They have only a partial database of all the blogs that exist, and an average of one new blog is being created every second. Lastly, most traditional search engines such as Google rank posts primarily based on the number of incoming links. However, in the blogosphere, the most relevant post may not have any incoming links, simply because the most relevant post is so new.

The new blog search engine tools take the nuances of the blogosphere into account. They strive to correctly identify blogs and posts by their relevance, timeliness, and popularity. Eventually, more criteria will be added to their equations. As more and more websites incorporate blog-type functionality (frequent updating) and technology (RSS), figuring out how to search blogs will be more and more important.

NYU college student intern Chris Duncan has researched the efficacy of the major blog ranking engines with us, and they are: PubSub, Technorati, Bloglines, Feedster, IceRocket, and Google Blog Search. Our thanks to Chris for his extensive research and contributions to this article. We were primarily interested in using these tools to identify the most influential blogs, in connection with the marketing for our new book, "The Virtual Handshake."

Here's our quick take on the contenders:

PubSub