Kevin Marks, a former engineer for the Technorati blog search engine, recently posted on Twitter.

Technorati ordered blogs by recency and relied on delicious and flickr for better tag results. Even if I did rebuild it you probably wouldn’t like it.

I miss Technorati and other RSS search engines.  However, Kevin brings up a good point: Technorati was developed at a time:

1. Before Twitter and Facebook which post breaking news regularly in their timelines;
2. Mainstream media was still publishing to the Web on a print-like timetable, mostly once or twice a day;
3. Search engines like Google still took some time to find, process and rank new web pages (posts).

So Technorati’s focus on “recency” was appropriate for the time, but not really needed now. (Although I’d still like to see a good RSS search engine today anyway.)

What we need is a search engine that would deep spider only non-commercial, independent blogs or filter out all the commercial crap and spam, so that you are only getting results from bloggers.  (Yes the big spidering search engines sort of do this, but you are unlikely to find individual blog posts on the first 5 pages of results for any popular keyword search.)

As I see it, what we need is depth in such an index with relevancy rather than recency as a ranking factor, although recency could be a secondary factor.  Plus you need to filter out the spam blogs.  This implies an algorithm of some sort.

This was also posted to
/en/search-engines.

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