The success of blogs over the years has multiplied the number of blogs available on the internet. Being an effective online marketing tool, businesses are greatly relying on blogs to advertise their products and to communicate with their customers, resulting in the rapid increase in new blogs. Whether you are an individual looking for a blog relating to your interests or you are a entrepreneur trying to connect to your potential customers, searching for the most suitable blog is no longer an easy job because not every blog is relevant. Different blog search applications like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Techme have been created to help you find the blogs that are most appropriate. Which application delivers the best search results? Let’s compare the two most established blog search services – Technorati and Google Blog Search – and see which one is better

Technorati

Technorati is an online blog search engine founded by Dave Sifry and launched in June 2002. It is a great search service that helps users find the most relevant blogs, photos, videos and audio. As far as blog search goes, it is the most authentic service. Currently it is indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. Last year, Technorati redesigned its home page and made some changes in search options. They now have a single search box instead of using search types like keyword search, tag search and blog directory search. Results are returned in categories like videos, blogs and music.

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search is a blog-specific search service by Google. It indexes all types of blogs, not just the blogs that were published through Google’s blog service, Blogger. This blog search engine allows the user to search blogs in all major languages including English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. “The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service,” explains Google Blog Search. Due to its “site feeds” search criteria, users can filter results by date.

Technorati vs. Google Blog Search – Which is Better?

These two search giants claim to offer the best blog search service. Technorati claims to have an authority on the web. Google, due to its dominance on internet search, claims to offer better services than its competitors. What do users think about these claims? How do IT experts evaluate the two services? Andy Beard blog has also made a comparison of the two services. According to the author, Google Blog Search relies on its traditional keyword search techniques, whereas Technorati gives more flexible search in terms of selection between keywords appearing as tags or within text. This comparison indicates that:

• Technorati is currently, without doubt, providing fresher results than Google - refreshing a Google blog search page tracking results sorted by date was providing 10 results in the last 2 hours. In contrast, Technorati is providing 10 results… in the last 10 minutes… and they are not spam.
• Google’s relevance in blog search seems to be heavily influenced by what, in the old days, would be looked on as keyword stuffing.
• Technorati doesn’t really attempt to classify content as being more relevant, other than authority requirements - you can select between the keywords appearing as tags, or within the text - there is no over reliance on titles to prove that something really is relevant.
• From a casual end user perspective, the search results using Google Blog search were relevant and fresh - for someone looking to research a story for a blog post, they might have to use additional filters based upon time (within the last 24 hours), and maybe also sort the results by date.

In his concluding remarks he says, “I love being able to rank well on Google Blog Search, but the criteria for ranking doesn’t currently provide more relevant results. Technorati provides fresher results from a wider selection of blogs.”

Although Andy Beard believes that Technorati is better option than Google Blog Search for searching for blogs, I think both services are good and provide efficient searches and accurate results. Technorati features “Multiple Search Filters” that deliver spam free results. On the other hand, Google Blog Search helps users find content filtered by date. Both services are working to improve search services to deliver the most relevant and accurate results, so we can expect a lot from the two.

References:

Andy.Beard. (2008). Blog Search Revisited - Google vs Technorati vs Techmeme. Retrieved Oct. 9^th, 2008 from http://andybeard.eu/2008/02/blog-search-revisited-google-vs-technorati-vs-techmeme.html

Blog Search Help. (2008). Retrieved Oct. 9^th, 2008 from http://www.google.com/support/faqs/bin/static.py?page=faq_blog_search.html&hl=en

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