Do Blog Search Engines Have Value?
I saw today a post on GigaOm about the value of blog based search engines and here is comment:
Few major differences:
1) Content found in search engines does not have an exact publication time and permanent link - which means it is only a momentarily snapshot of what the SE crawler found at a specific time. As a user you don’t really know whether the page has changed or when it was last updated.
2) Most of the content in blogs comes from real people (except for splogs and shadow pages) unlike search engine “blindness” to different content publisher types.
3) Calculating inbound linking (page ranking) inside the blogosphere create a much accurate picture on the target site relevance vs. link ranking calculation based on the whole web linking structure.
4) Blogs and posts are structured (you can reach a blog home page from every blog post) while web pages and home pages can be associated only by text based comparison of the url and the host address - weak mechanism.
5) Results in a blog search engine has much more meaning being sorted based on publication time vs. page ranking only algorithms. Users look at blog search results looking for freshness (mentioned many times in previous comments).
6) Crawling and spidering mechanisms being developed on the search engine side can be many times optimized vs. regular search engine tools thanks to the structured manner updates are retrieved (RSS index file)
And many other differences as well…
Dudu