{"id":349,"date":"2005-09-14T18:08:43","date_gmt":"2005-09-14T16:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/frenchfragfactory.net\/ozh\/?p=349"},"modified":"2005-09-19T16:12:57","modified_gmt":"2005-09-19T14:12:57","slug":"google-blog-search-vs-technorati-vs-icerocket-vs-blogpulse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/2005\/09\/google-blog-search-vs-technorati-vs-icerocket-vs-blogpulse\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Blog Search vs Technorati vs IceRocket vs BlogPulse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Celebrity Deathmatch : newcomer <a href=\"http:\/\/google.com\/blogsearch\">Google Blog Search<\/a>, old chap <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/\" rel=\"tag\">Technorati<\/a>, young competitors <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.icerocket.com\/?tab=blog\">IceRocket<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogpulse.com\/\">BlogPulse<\/a>. Let&#39;s find out which is the most <del datetime=\"2005-09-14T15:01:56+00:00\">ego boosting<\/del> relevant.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><b>Update<\/b> : dear visitors coming from <a href=\"http:\/\/thestreet.com\/p\/rmoney\/jamesaltucher\/10243112.html\">the Street.com<\/a>, I&#39;m glad you are here, but tell your sending guest that I&#39;m a bit upset that someone links an article of mine and I can&#39;t even read what he&#39;s written on his lame website for paying registered members only.<\/p>\n<h2>Round one : blog search<\/h2>\n<p>Let&#39;s search how many link to a weblog we know, say, errrr, my own blog.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.icerocket.com\/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Ffrenchfragfactory.net%2Fozh\">Ice Rocket<\/a> : 2 results. How insulting.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogpulse.com\/search?query=frenchfragfactory.net%2Fozh\">BlogPulse<\/a> : 177 results.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/search\/frenchfragfactory.net%2Fozh\">Technorati<\/a> : 172 links from 137 sites.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/google.com\/blogsearch?hl=en&#038;q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffrenchfragfactory.net%2Fozh\">Google Blog Search<\/a> : 101 links<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Ice Rocket<\/em>, despite some very good feedback I read here and there in the blogoworld, is pathetically out of business. Or maybe it just doesn&#39;t like me. But it doesn&#39;t really matter, since in both case, I just don&#39;t like it :)<\/p>\n<p><em>BlogPulse<\/em> and <em>Technorati<\/em> results are very similar. <em>Technorati<\/em> goes a step further with its counting links and sites, while <em>BlogPulse<\/em> doesn&#39;t filter duplicates out and only counts the number of links.<\/p>\n<p>And finally, <em>Google<\/em> is a bit late on this (for once I won&#39;t officially declare that Google has the truth :) but we can suspect that it may not be indexing the whole blogosphere yet. It would be interesting by the way to know how many blogs are indexed, similarly to <em>BlogPulse<\/em> and <em>Technorati<\/em> who claim to index 16 and 17,1 million blogs respectively. Google showed an unexpected entry in its results : today&#39;s last post on my own blog. On the plus side, it&#39;s nice to be sure that search results are fresh, but I wasn&#39;t really wondering if my own site was linking to itself.<\/p>\n<h2>Round two : blog entry search<\/h2>\n<p>Let&#39;s now refine this search to a narrower field. Last week&#39;s entry about some guy wearing a Microsoft tee-shirt with WordPress&#39; tag line has received a fair amount of hits, how many linked to it exactly ?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.icerocket.com\/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Ffrenchfragfactory.net%2Fozh%2Farchives%2F2005%2F09%2F10%2Fcode-is-poetry%2F\">Ice Rocket<\/a> : 8 links. How weird, considering previous test.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogpulse.com\/search?query=frenchfragfactory.net%2Fozh%2Farchives%2F2005%2F09%2F10%2Fcode-is-poetry\">BlogPulse<\/a> : 8 links.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/search\/frenchfragfactory.net%2Fozh%2Farchives%2F2005%2F09%2F10%2Fcode-is-poetry%2F\">Technorati<\/a> : 12 sites.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/google.com\/blogsearch?hl=en&#038;q=http%3A%2F%2Ffrenchfragfactory.net%2Fozh%2Farchives%2F2005%2F09%2F10%2Fcode-is-poetry%2F\">Google Blogs<\/a> : 5 links.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Excuse me <em>Ice Rocket<\/em>, but here again you&#39;re proving your inefficiency. How can you explain that 8 blogs link to an entry of mine while you pretend that only two link to my site ?.<\/p>\n<p>Once again, <em>Technorati<\/em> and <em>BlogPulse<\/em> have very similar results. Technorati finds 12 links, but 4 are duplicates from the same site, so we have the same number of links for both search engine.<\/p>\n<p>Now, the funny thing is : results in Google, Technorati and BlogPulse are not duplicates. Indeed, all three make a total of 13 different links. There is a market for some quick search engine that would just aggregate results from these 3 :)<\/p>\n<h2>Round three : RSS awareness<\/h2>\n<p>As a stat addict who checks every hour every stats you can think of, adding above search results in a feed reader is the quickest way to know when a new blogs links to you. (Or writes about something you&#39;re into, but we&#39;re only discussing ego topics here)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ice Rocket : I couldn&#39;t be bothered to do some test again with them.<\/li>\n<li>Technorati : you can make any search a &quot;watch list&quot;, in which an RSS feed is embedded. Too bad it&#39;s limited to 15 items.<\/li>\n<li>BlogPulse : RSS icon can be found right in the results page, and feed includes first 50 items.<\/li>\n<li>Google : while not clearly linked from the page results, an RSS or Atom feed is available, and contains up to 100 items.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Technorati<\/em> stays way behind its competitors, and <em>Google<\/em> wins easily this round. At the moment, I would still prefer <em>BlogPulse<\/em> results though, since it seems to be indexing more blogs, but there is no doubt here that Google will catch up soon.<\/p>\n<h2>Round four : time response<\/h2>\n<p>Ah ! I had to throw my two cents into the current &quot;Technorati&#39;s dead&quot; debate.<\/p>\n<p>To be honest, I was prepared to write something like &quot;I&#39;m still waiting for Technorati results&quot;, but I&#39;ve been lucky, or maybe they&#39;ve been upgrading their hardware : response time was acceptable. Far from being lightning flash, but at least it didn&#39;t end with some &quot;Sorry too many requests&quot; page. Blogpulse was still quicker though.<\/p>\n<p>And as for Google, oh my &#8230; I had to hit &quot;Refresh&quot; a few time just to be sure it was not loading a page from my browser&#39;s cache. Search results simply appear while your finger is still releasing the Return key.<\/p>\n<h2>Round five : extra features<\/h2>\n<p>While I&#39;m at it, let&#39;s have a look at bells and whistles. On this matter, <em>Technorati<\/em> and <em>BlogPulse<\/em> have interesting features, mostly about profiling weblogs that are returned in search results. BlogPulse wins here, with an interesting Blog Profile (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogpulse.com\/profile?type=overview&#038;url=http:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/\">mine<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>This is undoubtfully where <em>Google<\/em> can improve things here. I&#39;m not sure why, but while I like their default minimalist search results for general topics, I want more when it&#39;s about blogs. I want trends, keywords, ranks, pictures, neighborhood. I want distracting and fun things.<\/p>\n<h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>It will be interesting to see how Google is going to improve their Blog Search, and how Technorati will have nightmares or not about it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#39;ve been using BlogPulse for <a href=\"\/blog\/archives\/2005\/03\/31\/blog-keywords-trends-ozh\/\">a few months now<\/a>, and I&#39;m still thinking this tool is the most interesting and fun one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some quick comparison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[67,110,42,63,73,74,97],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-blogostuff","tag-blogpulse","tag-google","tag-review","tag-rss","tag-stats","tag-technorati"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}