Comments on: Blog search stinks

By: Mike Linksvayer » Blog search putrefying

Mike Linksvayer » Blog search putrefying — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:40:38 +0000

[...] complained before here that blog search stinks and isn’t getting better. Now I know why — in addition to blog search being a difficult [...]

By: Mike Linksvayer » Suppressing spam in search results

Mike Linksvayer » Suppressing spam in search results — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 16:48:55 +0000

[...] I should have said Google web search above. As Chris Masse points out in a comment below, blog search still stinks and so far Google and Yahoo! blog search do not improve the state of the art, contrary to my expectations. [...]

By: Mike Linksvayer » Alexa Grapher

Mike Linksvayer » Alexa Grapher — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 23:32:52 +0000

[...] I’d been meaning to put together an Alexa graph generating utility for months (well, one more accessible than URL editing, which I’ve always used, e.g., the graphs at the bottom of a post on blog search) and I finally got started last night. [...]

By: Mike Linksvayer » Going overboard with Wikipedia tags

Mike Linksvayer » Going overboard with Wikipedia tags — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:42:45 +0000

[...] The second reason I link to Wikipedia preferentially2 is that Wikipedia article URLs conveniently serve as “tags, as specified by the rel=”tag” microformat. If Technorati and its competitors happen to index this blog this month, it will show up in their tag-based searches, the names of the various Wikipedia articles I’ve linked to serving to name tags. I’ve never been enthusiastic about the overall utility of author applied tags, but I figure linking to Wikipedia is not as bad as linking to a tagreggator. [...]

By: Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 21:06:47 +0000

Kevin: Yeah, maybe they could do some very short term feed triage, but that wouldn’t help them scale better (which is a requirement, or they will have no customers in the not too distant future) and would piss off many customers–bloggers on long tail.

Bob: Good point. I imagine a graph of actual use would look something like the alexa graph above, but with pubsub shifted upward by some factor. Still, it is clear that Technorati has had a higher growth rate this year, with “reach” increasing something like 5x, vs. something like 2-3x for the others graphed.

By: Bob Wyman

Bob Wyman — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 16:44:26 +0000

Using Alexa numbers to compare blog search services is, unfortunately, of very limited utility. The problem is especially clear when you include PubSub in the mix. The vast majority of our users get their data from us by either polling RSS/Atom feeds or by using our Jabber/XMPP based “PubSub Sidebar” or the Gush Reader. There isn’t much you can do on our website except create/delete/modify a subscription. Thus, there isn’t much activity for Alexa to watch. Frankly, we’ve designed our system to minimize unnecessary web traffic. Thus, our Alexa numbers will always be lower than you might expect. We could easily increase our Alexa numbers simply by forcing users to click on more pages or force them to come back to the web site more frequently — but that would only serve our interests in helping to confuse folk who attempt to use Alexa data against us. Doing what it takes to get better Alexa numbers would NOT be in the interests of our users. Thus, we won’t do it.

bob wyman

By: Kevin Burton

Kevin Burton — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 21:57:54 +0000

Good blog post.

I wasn’t saying that they should only aggegate few blogs forever .. just until they get to the point where they can scale better. It’s more important to have happy customers than no customers.