Blogging Roller

Part II of my book is back from the dev and copy editors and I'm spending this weekend correcting and updating the chapters so they can be sent off to the type-setter. Most of the changes appear to be small, but the chapter on searching and monitoring blogs is in serious need of update.

The world of blog search has changed a lot recently. When I wrote the chapter last year, Technorati, Feedster and Pubsub we the whole story. Now Google is coming on strong, Yahoo is experimenting and who knows what Microsoft is doing. So I decided to try comparing the features of what appear (to me at least) to be the leading blog search engines. My new list is Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub and IceRocket. I'm not totally sure Yahoo belongs here, News Search appears to be pretty weak, but I'm going to leave them in because they're a big name. Note that Microsoft is not in the list (if they have blog search, I can't find it). Here's my blog search feature comparison matrix so far:



Are any of those features unclear or require explanation? Let's see. I probably shouldn't have listed "Ads in results newsfeed" as a feature, it's really more of a bug.  "Web interface to search" is only there because Pubsub doesn't have it -- you can't get search results on the Pubsub site, you must subscribe via newsfeed reader. I think the rest are self-explanatory.

And here is a list of the blog search services with links:

• Google BlogSearch
• Yahoo News Search (with blogs)
• Technorati
• Feedster
• Pubsub (more of a notification service than a search engine)
• IceRocket (should get extra points for Blog Trends)

If you have a correction, question or think I've left out something important, please let me know. Comments are open.

Update I: Feedster appears to be having problems these days. The Feedster API docs are not available, I get 404s for the Feedster API and the developer wiki. Link search and subscribe to search features are temporarily disabled because, the site says "Our Chief Scientist is bringing you something new in January!"

Update II: After receiving feedback from Mark Cuban of IceRocket, Greg Gershman of BlogDigger, Ian Kallen of Technorati, Steven Cohen of Pubsub and  Allen Graham of Feedster. I've updated my matrix. Cuban and Cohen sent in some corrections. Greg asked that I include BlogDigger and BlogPulse, so I did. I also added in a row for Open Search support. Both Kallen and Graham wrote in to tell of cool new features coming soon, but nothing new for the matrix right now.

Tags: topic:[Search],topic:[RSS],topic:[Atom],topic:[Blog Search],topic:[Yahoo],topic:[Google],topic:[Technorati],topic:[Feedster],topic:[IceRocket],topic:[Pubsub]