July 30, 2023
A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work
Mary Hodder of Napsterization.org has produced an analysis of five popular blog content search services (Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse, Pubsub). She examines what each of them searches, how they search, what sort of links they count and how long they keep those links counted. It gives us some idea of why the results from each of the search engines differs so greatly from the others. For example, Bloglines keeps all data on inbound links from Day One whereas Technorati keeps link data as long as it is on the front page of a blog, so their link count is much lower but much fresher.
Hodder has put her research into a table on a PDF file for easy reference. I’m sure many people will be using her table to produce more insights into the way each of these search engines work. I hope she’ll include Icerocket.com in that table when it becomes more popular.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for blogging the post. One correction, both Technorati and Bloglines keep links for all time, and report them in searches. But Technorati *only* reports those links on the front of a blog in its link counts, one unit per blog, no matter how many links come from that single blog. Bloglines gives you the total number of links since the history of their spiders/database info, and add all links no matter how many come from one blog. So Technorati emphasizes recency mixed with blogrolls, and Bloglines is just giving you a count, no matter when the links occured.
mary
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