I’ve complained before here that blog search stinks and isn’t getting better. Now I know why — in addition to blog search being a difficult and expensive service to run — there isn’t much demand. The blog search focused sites I mentioned in the “stinks” post each seem to have gained no traction since then, excepting Technorati, which itself is constantly rumored to be troubled.

A TechCrunch post on traffic at various Google properties finally gave me a clue and an inclination to look at my past posts on blog search. Click through to see a graph showing that Google Blog Search barely registers.

To end on a positive note, perhaps blog search is a good use case for distributed search, as it isn’t economic for a centralized entity to do well. This reminds me, whatever happened to various P2P syndication proposals?

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Only tangentially related to blog search, I really like Chris F. Masse’s post on blogs vs. newspapers, in which Wikipedia sits at the top of the ecosystem:

So the real winner is Wikipedia — a news and knowledge aggregator… using anonymous volunteers. But Wikipedia is only an information aggregator… it feeds on both media and blogs to gather the facts. Wikipedia is the common denominator of knowledge —not the primary source of reporting. Just like prediction markets feed on polls and other advanced indicators.