Six Blog Search Engines at a Glance

There are many different ways to stay informed and keeping track of what is happening in the blogosphere. Memetrackers are very useful tools if you don’t want to miss the latest buzz; though if you want to read more about a topic and even read blogs which have not been discovered by the crawlers of memetrackers it is best to choose one of the several blog search engines.

Blog search engines are not much different to usual search engines, so it is no wonder that Ask.com and Google are competitors here as well. The difference to “normal” search engines is their timeliness. You can find blog posts which are just a few minutes old whereas it will take a few days or even weeks until those posts are indexed by normal search engines.

I have had a look at six blog search engines: Ask Blog Search, Bloglines, Google Blog Search, Ice Rocket, Sphere, and Technorati.

Features

As you can see the list of features of the six competitors is quite different:

Ask’s blog search engine and Bloglines are very similar not just by the list of features; the search results are even the same which is no wonder because Bloglines was acquired by Ask in February 2005.
Some of the Ask results feature binoculars which allow a preview of the feed while Bloglines offers a full view of the article sometimes. Since Bloglines is also one of the top feed readers you can see how many Bloglines users are subscribed to a blog.

Surprisingly the two big players in the blog search market, Google and Technorati, don’t offer many features. However both are the top referring sites to my blog whereas I hardly get any visitors from the other engines.

Sphere and Ice Rocket don’t offer much to me, although Sphere’s search results are quite good.

So far I have mostly used Technorati but I guess I will use Bloglines or Ask more often because the features make sense and the search results are really good. But I will refer to Technorati as well; the results are really, really good.