Company: IceRocket (Soon to be renamed BlogScour)
Location: Dallas, Texas
What is it?
IceRocket is a blog search engine, and a damn good one, owned by Mark Cuban. In our opinion they aren’t quite ready to take on the king of blog search yet, but they are feature rich and doing some things very, very well.
There are two ways that people are comparing blog search engines today: total links for a given keyword or tag, and total links shown for a given blog. On both tests, IceRocket seems to be doing well (but not always). On the links into TechCrunch, IceRocket seems to be far and away the most up-to-date, this week (things change rapidly in the real-time-web).
IceRocket has a ton of great search and other tools, including search by keywords, tags (see their tag cloud here) and URLs.
They also have a trends service (see pre-defined trend competitions here), and hell, they even have email (when I was COO of GNR in London I sold one of our companies, NamePlanet, to NetIdentity, another Mark Cuban company which powers this). Finally, they also have a toolbar, which is awesome if you aren’t like me and still have enough browser real estate left to actually view web pages.
Basically, IceRocket is awesome. One area where they really shine is in search results. A result includes tons of useful links. In addition to a link to the source, there are also links to tags for the result, the blog itself, tools to refine the search to include or exclude that blog, number of links to the blog (for relevance and ego), and they even link to the RSS feed for the blog. All search results pages have RSS feeds.
Another fun tool is IceSpy, which shows a rolling list of incoming search terms (all linked). This reminds me of the flat screen in Google’s offices that shows incoming searches (although Google appears to filter out adult terms while IceRocket happily does not :-) ).
They are changing their blog search engine name to BlogScour sometime in the near future.
We’ve also seen an increasing trend by bloggers to tag their posts with IceRocket tags in addition to Technorati Tags.
Additional Screen Shots:
Team:
Blake Rhodes, CEO
Additional Links:
SomewhatFrank, Mark Cuban, Blogebrity, Tris Hussey, Tris Hussey #2, Mark Cuban #2, PostMoneyValue, Mark Evans, BennelliBrothers, I, Peculiar, Somewhat Frank #2, RSSBlog, pogenwurst, Austin Pauls, Steve Rubel, TheBigPicture, Net, Technoogle, Josheph Scott, MostlyMuppet, Freshblog
IceRocket Tags: icerocket, blogscour, markcuban, feedster, technorati, blogpulse, bloglines, google, tagcloud, tags, tagging, search, blogsearch, web2.0