Blog tools

While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search billions of Web pages, blog search sites typically focus on between 10 million and 20 million blogs. But, in many ways, the upstarts are as different from each other as they are from the giants. Technorati, for instance, relies mostly on a mechanism called “pinging” to monitor blogs. Most bloggers maintain their journals through blog publishing services like Blogger or LiveJournal, which have features that can automatically send out a “ping” to notify search services when a user's blog has been updated. David Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, says his company gets an edge from exclusive deals in which some blog-hosting companies ping Technorati before anyone else. After receiving a heads-up, Technorati visits the blog and updates its database.

Hmm, what good is pinging first if you don't get indexed in a timely manner? Of course, for all my public complaining, I still check technorati frequently, often comparing the results I get with IceRocket's results. I haven't gotten scientific enough to keep track of which engine gives me better results, but IceRocket did point out that some jokester was stealing a photo of new Maverick Doug Christie from me. I mutated the photo and added a little friendly text about bandwidth stealing, and the offending site removed my image from their page. Technorati found nothing.

In fact, Technorati has been timing out consistently as of late. So once again, their press is ahead of their performance.

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more from the WSJ:

Web logs, online diaries written and published by everyone from college students to big media companies, are being created and updated at an astonishing rate -- and established search companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. don't always catch them fast enough. Now, a handful of closely held upstarts such as Technorati Inc., Feedster Inc. and IceRocket.com LLC see an opportunity: Build a search engine that can track the information zipping through blogs, nearly in real time.

The new sites are gaining traction with users looking to sample what people are talking about online, from the fallout from Hurricane Katrina to silly celebrity gossip. As free tools make it easier for even the most technophobic to publish online, there's a growing demand for services to sift through the clutter.
The new services, some of which are less than a year old, aren't without their glitches. The technology is still evolving and companies are still looking for the best way to track and sort blogs. Some services miss large numbers of blogs, while others pull up irrelevant sites.

Tags: Technology