weblog meta search engines

Filed in archive Technology on March 16, 2004

Following up my discussion with Kevin Jones and Edward I was pondering with the idea of a working weblog ezine or the future of content sorting.

Indeed there are many weblog search engines like Feedster, Waypath, Blogdex, Technorati, Daypop (and probably a dozen others) that do a weblog Keyword search. According to anecdotal evidence I collected using these machines Google is still my favorite. Usually the small additional term blog or weblog leads to much better search results than any of the other engines deliver. What is a real advantage of Technorati is the instant link collection making the determination of favorite items easy. But this system is often flawed by spammers or miscalculations of real links. Out of my experience "Daypop TOP 40's" or "Technorati's Breaking News" are hardly a list of quality.

Nick Denton is also investing into this space. His Project Lafayette or nowadays Kinja is also looking for a way to optimize filter and sorting technologies.

Again my question arises is/will artificial intelligence be strong enough to filter the 99% unrelevant content out? My favorite news aggregator so far is Topix. But even this great piece of technology wouldn't be any favorite for my breakfast reading. It has some great news, but mixed with many hardly noteworthy. The New York Times has much more value every day although it probably use only a fraction of the sources.

Also just try out the "business" category on Blogrunner and you'll see several hardly related though good posts.

So what so you think will be the future? Is it that artificial intelligence will improve so much that we have a "better then Google"- Kinja or Technorati or whatever soon for weblogs? Or will this development be just another 'bubblet'?