Did Yahoo kill their blog search service? That’s the top meme on Techmeme, but since it is based on just one report, it is prudent to wait for Yahoo to officially say something. Yahoo had launched blog search with much fanfare in October 2005 as part of Yahoo news search. The results for something, say Skype resulted in results from mainstream media sources and from blogs. Well, apparently that is not the case anymore. If they indeed did kill the service, I am not going to miss it, since I wasn’t a fan in the first place.
Kevin Burton says that some blogs are being included in the Yahoo News search results like those of Lifehacker. We found results from Gizmodo, both publications from the Gawker stable. Still, he does make a good point when he writes…
Most consumers just want to search. They don’t think about blogs. If you’re searching Google for ‘Firefox’ and the top result is from a blog and the second result is mozilla.org why would you not show the first result? The trick is to ship a decent algorithm that can build a composite index.
There have been some doubts about the viablity of the while notion of blog search. My contention has been that when doing blog search, contextual relevance is more important. Other people think that instant or near real time results are more important. What do you think?
“Did Yahoo kill their blog search service?”
Yes, we did.
I suggested we blog about it, but sadly that didn’t happen.
I don’t really use blog search per se. Google is still the place I look first, and if the first result is a blog, very well, especially since some of the best information is in the blogosphere. I do find that the only time I use Technorati is when I when I want to see more recent results, but usually I am interested in contextual results. To track meme’s I find Sphere sometimes gets me better results. For research its still Google + del.icio.us/Diigo.
The ideal scenario would be a source agnostic search (or a suitably weighted algorithm) which has aggregation/clustering capabilities around sources and/or time. At least for me
I do actually.
Since blogs have become my main tech news source, I always try for blog searches first.
However, the biggest headache in the general search results from both Google and Yahoo is the huge number of results for prouduct sales. I wish there was some way this could be separated out, so that I can get to the relevant results faster.
JZ, thanks for the confirmation of the news. appreciate that.
One drawback with e.g. Technorati is much the same as with Google: it focuses on general/global, rather than personal relevance, and therefore very much lives up to its name in skewing results massively towards the A-listers.
You won’t readily find my blog if you search on “digital identity” on Technorati, even though I write on that subject a good deal—hopefully some of it worth reading if you’re into that subject—and have had a few tens of incoming links from A/B-list blogs over the last couple of years. But unless your incoming links are fresh (last month or so), you rapidly drop out of sight in the blogosphere.
Personally, I rely on recommendations by the 52 bloggers I read regularly (thanks guys!) to discover personally-relevant stuff mostly, but if I am searching on a “global” topic like “useage statistics for MySpace”, both Google and Technorati can prove very useful.
weaverluke
I find myself wanting to “search by voice”: commercial or personal. That means aggregating blogs, some wikis, personal homepages, and forums into the “personal” category. Narrowing to blogs alone is rarely productive.
The real value of blog search is in tagged content, not keyword search. My feeds for articles tagged “ims” keeps me fully up to date with that subject area with minimal effort.
This makes sense to me. News Search is for news. There are lots of specialized search indexes for things like job search, people search, product search, mobile search, video search, etc. Why put blog results in News Search?
The funny thing is that Yahoo still has some blog results in its News index. For example, Search Engine Roundtable, a blog, shows up in a Yahoo News Search query for “Yahoo Search”. Results from Gawker blogs also show up in queries. So, maybe the more accurate statement is that Yahoo has removed most blog results from it’s News Search index.
Google does the same thing, including a result from blog.searchenginewatch.com, …clearly a blog. MSN Search returned pure news results as far as I could tell.
Don Dodge
http://dondodge.typepad.com/thenextbigthing/2006/08/yahooblog_sear.html
I use blogsearch in the sense that I subscribe to feeds originating from Technorati and Google blog search results. It’s useful to keep up with what’s happening right now on a specific topic.
Unfortunately Google does not allow me to subscribe to a general purpose search results (other then through email alerts). If it did, I am not sure I would differentiate between results coming from blogs vs. other sources.
I also go to the various blogsearches for very specific research purposes.
But when I search, 99% of the time it’s just standard search.
“blogsearch” would be useful as a feature – checkbox – on the general purpose search. I am not sure it deserves a specific niche in the long run.
I don’t understand why so much of hoopla over this. Yahoo still is searching Blogs..so what’s the big deal?
By putting such news on internet, one if promoting stupidity..
Ashish
iDea Labs
I am also very dissapointed with the search results of many of my searches, since the top search results are blogs or forums, most of which do not have the relevant info concerning the keywords I searched for. Google rules in this blog search, but it would be really nice to continue to have the competition from Yahoo. Even if this post here is about reminding us of a yahoo blog search, I think it’s good.. so that we should know… 🙂
I think there is a very specific audience for blog search. The blog “news cycle” is reduced to minutes for those who use the blogosphere, or live in it. That’s why techorati has real time tools like technorati mini. The cycle of info is much much faster there. So to put blog posts in a general search buckets doesn’t do a lot for usability.