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With comments happening all over the place, how do beginners find meaningful conversations where they will be accepted in?
I was really trying to avoid the "where do I find conversations" side of this as I have heavy interest in it. I developed YackTrack, then there is also BackType, SocialMention and others. They are all attacking the problem from different angles, so I recommend you give them a try.
A number of things have changed since your post on Mashable. Our data quality is improving considerably as we've eliminated a lot of the spam that had infiltrated the index. The index entry barrier is a higher, which is a mixed blessing; less spam is good, missing some legit blogs is bad but we're continuously improving the index quality as well as the coverage. The tag pages rolled out in last month's site update have restored the separation between tag aggregation and keyword search. The changes the year prior that mingled the two were mistaken but we're adapting; the tag pages are once again topical pivots through the blogosphere. Additionally, the crawler we're rolling out makes blogroll and post link distinctions much more reliably. Finally, service response times and availability levels have been greatly improved.
The focus on helping bloggers and brands find who is talking about them, the topics they care about and the markets they serve continues to provide value. However as you've noted, blog search isn't enough, we're focused also on discovery applications, publisher services and ad services. We're also considering ways to bring in more social media to provide a broader 360 degree lens, we'd love to hear from folks about what they would find valuable in that regard. If you haven't explored the blogosphere through Technorati lately, give it a try and let us know what you think, we're listening!
thanks,
-Ian
Thanks for stopping by, and I think it is fantastic that you are replying to posts like this. I still use Technorati sometimes, and I do not like Google Blog Search. As you say, Technorati does have more than just pure blog search. Keep on working at it, because as we know, the internet is a fickle beast. One day you are the whipping boy, but the next you could be the darling again. Good luck with your new development.
We built our own search engine partly because we ran into the same problem you highlight, what is the purpose of these other engines? Our use is very specific, and none of the other engines either satisfied our need, had good enough quality results, or gave third party API or feed access to results to build on.
People are complaining about the state of blog search, but there's yet to be a clear business model for general blog search. With ads on the decline I think highly targeted and application specific search will be where innovation in this space occurs.
That is really what I was trying to say towards the end of this post. Blog search by itself is too narrow a focus. There is much more information and functionality that could be added to something like Technorati, and blog search is really just a feature.
/Anton, twingly.com
The problem with current blog searchsphere is the lack of tools to discover new blogs, using technorati ranking only returns quick to find blogs. This is an open space for future Google competitors.