The Other Blog Search Engine That Launched Yesterday

Bloglines wasn’t the only company to push out a new blog search engine yesterday – Gnoos launched as well. And though their launch timing could not have been more unfortunate, there is a lot about this Australia-focused blog search engine to like.

Gnoos is focused on indexing Australian blogs as well as bloggers with a “global voice”. Because of the different focus it’s hard to compare the result set for a given query to other blog search engines. I’m focusing on the feature set instead, and in that respect Gnoos is at the top.

Each results (a blog post) can be commented on at Gnoos, and rated. Total votes up and down for a post are counted and, soon, will be used to determine relevance in later searches. Clicking on the “more” button pulls up the entire post. This seems like an obvious feature and some of the other new blog search engines have it, but Technorati continues to leave this out, forcing a click through to the blog to read the entire post. Finally, and I like this feature best, tags can be added to a post on the fly in a box below the summary – and although tags aren’t useful right now, Ben tells me that they will be building functionality around tags soon.

Beyond the features, there’s just something that feels good about the Gnoos site. It may be its uncluttered design, quick response time to searches or something intangible, but it just seems like a site I could spend a lot of time on. Ben, you should consider expanding this beyond Australia.