Robert Scoble steps through what would make a better blog search.
Summed up it comes down to this: Bloggers’ expectations of search are far beyond where the search engines are. In addition, on the search service side, the engine developers are still trying to figure out what makes sense. And blogs have grown so popular that they’ve become an unrelenting target of spammers. This has only grown to complicate the problem. Any solution has to all but eliminate spam from the first page of any blog search results. Zero spam allowed. If you’re going to write a blog search engine, put this at the top of the list. There is no easy fix. It’s going to take time.
Finally, although relevancy will help, there’s more to a great search than digesting blog content in some meaningful way. Search results have to be timely. Take Apple’s iPod announcement yesterday. I wanted to follow along to see what was happening. I searched the various blog search engines. I wanted to see bloggers listed that were at the event. The search results were all over the place. The blog hits were all from “old” posts (albeit all were recent). I finally gave up and searched Google news and got to CNet and Engadget.
Search isn’t done. That’s for sure.