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.
I am so glad we have yet another blog search engine!
Okay, so where is the blog meta-search engine? Back in the 90’s, there were so many search engines popping up that people were developing meta-search engines to combine results… Ditto is happening with the blog arena, so where’s the meta-search? lol
there seems to be a heap of blog search engines nowadays, with so much competition, i can see a lot of these sites closing up shop soon, with only a couple left to battle it out with the big boys
Does anyone notice much traffic from these ‘blog search engines’? At http://www.idahofallz.com (a community-focused website) I examine my visitor logs and especially referrals daily, and I have yet to see a single visitor coming form one of these supposed blog search engines.
Ni-ni-nice!
web 2.0 sites based on “cool technology” = internet bubble 2.0.
good business ideas = viable businesses.
I’ve seen a lot of sites come online recently that don’t seem viable. Granted, I’m trying to make a few bucks on my new blog
(Can you blame me?)
It just seems to me like we’re headed for the internet bubble all over again. Then again, the internet bubble 1.0 did have a benefit:
We “over-invested” in technology and infrastructure in internet bubble 1.0. Now we are reaping the benefits of this over-investment because the price tag for the infrastructure is low (it’s already been paid for by bankrupted startups).
Actually, as the NY Times best seller book “the world is flat” puts it, the third world nations are benefiting from our over-investment in infrastructure.
i cannot subscribe to feeds acording to their tags. for ex, i want to subscribe to feeds tagged `rss`, but when i submit the link that rojo gave me, netvibes says there is no such feed
Very nice feature, looks like search engines get focused on blogs more
This is what happens when features become companies - most of the blog search engines differ only in trivial UI details and minor tweaks in result prioritization algos. It’s not healthy for the market to have so many companies mimicking each other - I hope blog search is headed for a consolidation.
This just gave me a business idea! 10x!!