Google's blog search engine is a more recent development than the others. Its advanced functions and speed are consistent with other Google products. It can search for blog title, authors, and by date (but not any posts before March of 2005). Unfortunately, they do not provide a general ranking list of the top X number of blogs. However, we can use the "link:" feature to see how many sites are linking to some of the more popular sites we've seen. We will also compare this to their Google "link:" numbers so we can see how they differ.
| blogsearch.google.com/ (# blogs linking to this blog) |
Google.com (# sites linking to this site) |
|
| boingboing.net | 18,042 | 53,000 |
| fark.com | 1,462 | 52,100 |
| slashdot.org | 10,297 | 185,000 |
| dailykos.com | 1,794 | 7,120 |
| engadget.com | 1,170 | 62,800 |
Obviously, the numbers vary greatly. This can be attributed to the fact that the Google Blog Search has a much smaller pool of sites in which it finds results and possibly in part due to the fact that these results only date from March 2005. In any case, Google Blog Search rankings and in-links will probably become important benchmarks, and contribute further to Google's ever-more-impressive earnings.
There is obviously no perfect ranking system on the Internet--either for blogs or for web sites in general-- and there probably never will be. Our recommendation is that PubSub try to focus their results on real blogs; too many of their results are commercial sites or blog utilities. Technorati needs to become more accurate in their counts of links. Bloglines and Feedster could be substantially improved if they took the next step and separated the blogs into categories. If your goal is to find the most influential bloggers, in a given category or overall, you're best off using Technorati.
The ideal system would incorporate elements from all of the services that we've discussed--link tracking, in-linking, feed subscriptions, tags, viewer ratings--and then find the best way to weight them. It's a (much-disputed) truism of biology that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," but it's happening here. Blog search engines and ranking tools are recapitulating the evolution of Web search engines such as Google. When Google launched, many thought that the search engine game was already settled, but Google became very powerful because it provided a truly superior search experience. There is room for just as much innovation in the blog search world.
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