The List to end all lists…for today

 

Finding a reliable way to locate top blogs can have its issues. Today PC magazine released its Top 100 blogs. For those interested, they have also provided a program that will load its Top 100 list into your browser’s favorites. The list has many repeats from the Technorati 100, but there are quite a few differences. At first glance, since the list is based on preference (and not questionably useful measuring metrics) it provides a much broader view of top blogs than Technorati…

Search Update – more fractured and less useful!

Im not entirely sure how I became a search nerd, but as Ive arrived at this conclusion I have noticed that search really isnt getting better. For those of you that havent seen…Technorati updated their site again. Quite upsetting. They succeeded in making their site slower to load/navigate as well as create a new section called Topics. What false hope this was…instead of…I dunno…ranking out top blogs on certain topics like the Top 100, they have decided to create a running stream of select blogs on only a handful of broad topics(see making site slower). This is on the heals of the CEO leaving…brilliant way to lower your market value before selling yourself to…Google? Here are a few more search engines Ive come across:

Good Search – Search while donating to charity (Great idea…uses Yahoo search engine)
Hakia – “meaning-based” (semantic) search engine (very interesting, still testing)
Mahalo – world’s first human-powered search engine (not impressed)

Technorati going the way of Friendster?

The CEO of Technorati stepped down today after an unsuccessful search for his replacement. Why does this matter you ask? Technorati as of late has been falling behind Ask.com and Google Blog Search in providing quality search results. If it does die off…I think it would be just fine, since its redesign is very user unfriendly.

The problem is Technorati provides the Blog ranking standard that is generally excepted industry wide. Will anybody step up with a better ranking system…perhaps one built off of traffic and not links? Time will tell, but until then…online measurement continues the course of crudtastic fun.

Beyond the quantitative measuring sticks for online that have varying degrees of success (Technorati, Alexa and Compete)…here are some qualitative considerations I developed a few months ago for client work to determine relevance of blogs:

1) Subject matter – some topics are not of interest to large groups, so it will not have high traffic. It may be read by a large portion of the target group though. An example would be a blog specifically discussing Alaska National Parks.
2) Comments – Below each post in a blog is a comments section; the number of comments a blog gets is another way to determine popularity(this would not show up in the link results)
3) Visual presentation – How professional looking a site is also a determining factor; low traffic blogs often have poor or generic web development; high read blogs often have a clean professional look; shows the time and dedication blogger took to developing site
4) How often a blogger posts – If it has been over a month since the last post, the blog likely has a low relevancy; blogs need to be constantly updated to retain readership
5) Blogroll – Blogs list out other blogs it reads in its blogroll. If a site is listed in many top blogs blogroll it has more exposure

Any thoughts out there for additional qualitative or quantitative measurements?

The World of Search

This may be a bit of an odd first post, but recently there have been major and “exciting” new changes in online search that I felt compelled to speak up about. Since online search impacts many of the fundamentals of what we do, it is important to note some of the major improvements in that arena.

For social media search, Technorati got a face lift. Technorati is now the first major example of the new trend in online search deemed “universal search.” In short they knocked down the category silos allowing users to search the breadth of social media(blogs, pictures, videos) in one search vs searching for a specific term individually in blog search, picture search and video search. This is also a major change in direction for Technorati as it becomes more of an overall social media search engine with less focus on pure blog search. You can read more on TechCrunch.

More important is the term universal search that was announced by Google and commented here on GoodMorningSilconValley. As this is slowly rolled out I suspect the dramatic changes seen on Technorati will also occur on the online search engines such as Google and Ask.

Lastly, yes, I mentioned Ask.com. For anyone who will listen…yes the commercials are true, it is all about the algorithm and currently Ask.com has the best. Ask.com may not pull as many results as Google, but it absolutely provides better results(in my opinion). In particular, its blogs and feeds search is very strong.