After writing about new blog search engines from Bloglines and Gnoos this week, Chris Alden (Rojo CEO) pointed out to me that Rojo also quietly launched a blog search service earlier in the month. Rojo has focused on building out its feed reader in the past – this is its first real dive into blog search.
It looks like it went nearly undetected: there are no comments or trackbacks to the Rojo blog post announcing the product (although Library Clips caught it). Rojo blog search can be accessed from the search bar on the top right of the Rojo home page.
Rojo takes a stab at solving the blog search relevance problem (which I discussed in the last paragraph of this post). Results are ranked according to freshness, total subscribers to the underlying feed, total “mojo” votes (a Digg-like feature – see here for a description), whether people have tagged the story (a sign that they liked it) and total number of times the post was read. This is an algorithm approach to relevance, similar to what Sphere and Bloglines have done (although with very different data points). And it seems to work – relevance is very good.
Rojo is trading off quality with depth of the index. Unlike Technorati, Rojo is indexing just a couple of million blogs. Whether a blog is in the index is based on, first, subscribers from its feed reader product (if someone subscribes to a blog, it’s automatically in the index) and second, additional blogs that they’ve determined to be of high quality, through a spidering process.
Results are presented along with a voting and tagging feature, and the “+” symbol can be clicked to see the full blog post.
This is just a first pass at search. Chris tells me they will be relaunching with a new interface in a couple of weeks. More on this then.