Technorati Winning the Search Wars? Not Exactly. Just a Skewed Test.

The announcement of Google Blog Search prompted Steve Rubel to set up a test blog to compare several Blog Search tools.  But what exactly is the objective of the comparison?

Steve’s original definition: “ Let’s see how quickly/well they work “   Then, in the test blog itself he talks about testing “the different engines’ ability to spider the full-text of a blog “. 

Well, there’s not much to test there, we already know from the announcement that “Bloogle” only indexes feeds, so that’s a given.  Nevertheless, Steve picks a search term ( “ms. mxyzptlk” ) that is AFTER the extract Blogger uses for the Atom feed.  No wonder the search term produces no results – it’s not supposed to.

However, when Steve declares Technorati a winner, he clearly characterizes it as a test on timeliness: “ Only Technorati indexed my blog search post from yesterday so far, nearly 18 hours after I posted it “

There is a small problem though:  Steve’s post is already  indexed on Google at the time of his second post, but of course one can  only find it by searching for a text-string BEFORE the feed cutoff (like i did in the above link).

Conclusion: this “test” is irrelevant to the speed of the search engines, all it did was confirm that Bloogle indeed performs as stated.

Of course one can debate whether searching feeds instead of the original html is a good idea or not, but that’s a completely different issue.   And, perhaps the right question to ask is just how we should manage our feeds?

I have previously argued that it’s a better practice to publish full feeds anyway.  At least for people who care more about their message getting out, than click-throughs on ads on their site.

On the other hand, indexing full content seems to be a bit shaky, at least for Technorati: they admittedly “get lost” and mix up post body, title, tags from different posts in their index. If parsing full html is so difficult (not that I agree with that), than perhaps using the feed is a safer bet (?) 

Tags: Google, Google Blog Search, Bloogle, Technorati, Blogs, Blogging, Search, Search Wars, Steve Rubel, Micro Persuasion