Search Briefs: Happy Birthday to Technorati!; Feedster Gets Another Round of Funding and Acting President
+ In race with Google, it's consistency vs. 'wow' (via New York Times via News.com)
Comment: So many services, so little time. Like we've said many times on ResourceShelf, those who follow search on a minute by minute basis forget that most users have little to no idea of what's available and as the article points out, it can also get confusing. Again, a role for the info pro to keep current and train the end user. At the same time, it's also about getting the most useful services in front of the end user with little to no extra effort
+ Technorati Celebrates Its Third Anniversary
Congrats and kudos to David Sifry and team. To celebrate the site has a new look and several new features that are listed in this blog post. Some of what's new:
++ New Home Page Design
++ Redesigned Results Page
We're still seeing lots of spam but that's blog search for you.
++ Now tracking nearly fifty million blogs.
Is that blogs or feeds? How does Technorati define a blog? Is a blog equal to a feed? Do they remove duplicate feeds? How many of those feeds have more than 1 or 2 subscribers? How often are these feeds updated? How often are feeds removed from the index. To give you an idea, 50 million blogs means that every person in metropolitan NYC, LA, Chicago, and DC/Baltimore (minus a few) has a blog.
++ New "Discover" Section
Lists top posts in seven categories.
++ Improved "Popular" Section
++ Personalization added to the "Favorites" section. Much more here. Btw, one key point about Technorati is that it is one of the few blog engines that actually crawls the full text of the HTML from a blog. Very important and potentially very useful for the researcher. Why? If a blog or a feed is only syndicating a headline or snippet (let's say 25 words or so) many RSS engines will not make that content searchable. Since Technorati goes directly to the HTML, they are able to index the full text of the post.
See Also: Review the Technorati Home Page Over the Past Three Years (via the Google Blogoscoped)
and while we're on the blog/feed search beat...
+ Feedster feeds on second funding round from current investors (from San Francisco Business Journal)
The 3-year-old San Francisco-based blog search engine brought in Tyler Goldman this week as a board member and acting president. Goldman was previously senior VP of corporate and business development at Movielink, and founder and CEO of Broadband Sports Inc. The company also landed a second round of venture financing from current investors, including Selby Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and Mitsui & Co., as well as new investor Felicis Ventures.
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