Open The Dialogue

Nick Bradbury is talking about how he has reverted back to using Technorati to search blogs after playing with Google’s BlogSearch for awhile. For some time now, I’ve been recommending Technorati to most people who ask how they can find blogs on a specific topic, with the caveat that “it’s not perfect, but it’s what we’ve got” – I still stand by that, because the strange empty search for a popular site or error does pop up here and there, but it’s not like it was three or four months back. In Nick’s comments, Randy Charles Morin mentions IceRocket, a project that Mark Cuban is behind, and I’ve gotta say that it’s one of the more functional engines for searching – blogs or otherwise – that I use today. Being able to exclude things, subscribe to them, and drill down with one click are definitely things that I use regularly, and would highly recommend you go check it out for those reasons.

Last night the tech world heralded the true launch of Google Base, the new service that looks to index anything and everything that the search tool hasn’t already found, and make it (somewhat) easy to filter through to find what you’re looking for. Job postings, classified ads, event listings, even news and stories on various topics will all make their way into Google Base, and users of the service will be able to sort through it all.

This is a huge story on Tech Memeorandum this morning, and with good reason. What I’m actually *happy* to see is that there are a lot of good critical voices out there. I can’t say that this won’t be a huge seller and be a very helpful tool for a lot of people, companies, and organizations. What I will say is that what Fred Wilson is thinking might be spot on. There are already services that handle certain things that Google Base is doing – from tagging to blogging to photo sharing to job postings – so will putting that all in one bucket with a pretty good search tool make it a worthwhile place for people to spend a good portion of their surftime? Will Google Base end up being open permanently on people’s desktops as a repository of all things content, whether that be what kind of toolshed you’re looking to have built in your backyard to a link to an editorial you got printed in your local paper? What levels of integration will it have with other Google products? Do sites that already own a lot of usership suffer in the long term, or do they gain traffic and success because of Base’s functionality? It already points to CareerBuilder’s job listings, which are now “searchable” without ever having to go to CareerBuilder’s own site until you want to look more closely. Additionally, what does this mean for people who are utilizing other Google services, like AdWords, that could potentially get overlapped by this? At TechCrunch, one commenter asks why he should be using AdWords for a keyword campaign for a job posting when he could just list the job through Base. Now obviously Base doesn’t have the usership that Google prime does, but that could change fairly quickly, especially for those “in the know.”

Dan Gillmor, I think, is asking a similar question – or really, making a rhetorical statement, if one can do so – when he says “There’s so much more here, potentially, than immediately meets the eye.” In my opinion, this is an easy way to get everyone to do for Google what it, and its search algorithms, haven’t been able to do alone – sort, filter, and deliver content, maybe even un-indexable content, in a way that makes the rest of the GoogleBot braintrust happy. You think you get a lot of search results now? I’d expect to see a big change there in the very near future, should this catch on.

Scott Baradell at Media Orchard is asking about the difference in the top search result between Yahoo!’s Buzz Index (within the music category) and Technorati’s Top Searches This Hour. Yahoo!, on both its “Music” category and in the “Overall” listing has “Britney Spears” as the top search right now, whereas Technorati has “Prussian Blue” as its top search (Click the image below for a larger version).

Obviously, it should be clarified here that the people who are searching Yahoo! as a whole are a completely different population than those that are using Technorati on a regular basis. Sure, there’s some overlap, and they’re not totally exclusive populations, but I would venture a guess that a very large percentage of Yahoo! search engine users don’t use Technorati at all. Obviously this answers the topline question that Baradell poses, but it also brings up a completely different one.

What about the fact that except for Rosa Parks, there is no other overlap in the lists – and on Yahoo!, “Rosa Parks” isn’t in the leaders, just in the “Movers” section, meaning there is an increase in searches for her name and associated terms. Obviously there’s a scale issue here – moving the needle on Technorati, no matter how many blogs it indexes, is never not quite at the point that Yahoo! is. At the same time, does it show that the users of Technorati are not representative of “The Web” as a whole? I’d say that’s more likely, at least a little bit. So if that’s the case, what do we do with that fact?

If anything, I think we can say that blog readers / searchers are exactly what most who understand them from a marketing perspective realize – that those who are reading / writing them have very targeted focuses (focii?), and have different priorities. Maybe it’s that blog searchers understand search tools a little more, and aren’t using as “highly trafficked” topics as those who use a search engine would, (again, I’m going out on a limb here). At the very least, I would have to say that except when something exceptionally crazy happens – such as the Desperate Housewives intro debacle on ABC’s “Monday Night Football” or a famous musician dies – entertainment isn’t the priority for Technorati users. Sports, more “newsworthy” items, technology issues, and politics seem to rule the roost when it comes to blog searches, based on my frequent visits to Technorati’s main page. That’s not to say that blog readers / searchers are more cultured or anything as a whole – believe me, I’m sure that’s not the case – just that entertainment and celebrity isn’t necessarily a priority for those individuals.

Costa Tsiokos is asking why Google has so many interfaces for its Blog Search tool. In actuality, it’s all about comfort level and user choice. Just as you can get to this site by going to openthedialogue.org or openthedialog.net (among others), Google has set up their Blog Search function to be somewhat ubiquitous across its network, enabling users of the Blog*Spot hosting service for Blogger to easily access it while offering a Google-esque blogsearch.google.com for those who are used to heading over to the primary Google page.

This isn’t about too many extensions of a brand or anything, it’s just offering something to anyone who might be utilizing Google’s many services, essentially those in the blog arena.