My Blog Search Engine Manifesto

Author eriksr on July 21st, 2008

Hot on the heels of my rant about Technorati…okay, not on the heels at all, but let’s pretend, yeah? Comes word from Kristen Nicole at Mashable that Blogged.com has added blog article search to its repertoire.

This excited me. I recently gave up on using Technorati to identify influential bloggers and thought, yay, a potential replacement. Alas, it’s not meant to be.In all fairness to Blogged, I’m not their target market. Me, I just want to find the top bananas that are getting the exclusive information, who are leading the discussion, and so on. It doesn’t seem to be possible to sort anyone this way on Blogged.

Well, this brings me to the manifesto. A short list of simple things blog search engines can do to increase their value to everyone.

The List

Bring back authority. I don’t want to see an article that reviews content from a writer several steps removed from the original source. If I type “laptop” into the search field, show me who is most often getting the top spots for writing about laptops.
If you don’t have something unique and game changing, don’t bother playing. There are niche search engines out there with a miniscule percentage of the search market clinging tenaciously to the few users too stubborn to switch to a better search engine — like, say, Yahoo! or Google! — that are two bad quarters away from being dust. Don’t play that game — bring a radical new technology or search innovation or develop something useful like a service to submit your news to Digg and Reddit simultaneously.
Enough with the news portals already. Did you have to go and create a “top news” type of portal on your homepage? Maybe you should give your users three good reasons why they should use yours over, say, Google News or their favorite niche site, in big bold letters. C’mon!
Let us drill down with more categories, and even search within results. You’ve got your big broad categories like “Health” and “Technology” and “Politics”. But do you have anything about “Networking” or “Libertarianism”? Give us the ability to refine our searches tightly, or even add our own custom categories. And please, please let us search within a set of results!
Sell out to Yahoo! or Google. Yeah, that’s right — perhaps the best way you can provide value to everyone is by selling yourself to the sites that are doing a fantastic job of things already. Your traffic, your database, and the odd competitive advantage you bring will go a long way to enriching whoever acquires you — and your readership.