Technorati/Ask is getting better in splog war than Google is

December 21, 2006 By

I put both of these blog search engines on notice. One improved. The other didn’t.

I thought Google had a bunch of PhD’s who cared about search quality?

Here’s my test. Any blog search engine that includes http://news.naikmichel.com in its result set is outright crap.

That’s a splog (it’s an automated copy of Scobleizer). Get rid of it Google, please.

Technorati wins!

Here’s the two tests:

Technorati. No Naik Michel.
Google Blogsearch. Has Naik Michel.

But, Ask’s blogsearch really is the winner here. I didn’t need to ask it to get rid of good old Naik.

Sphere is bad too. No Naik, but it has a different splogger. BlueBoxSystem.com.

UPDATE: Whoa, just checked out IceRocket and didn’t find any splogs, but lots of interesting little features like hot links up at top. I gotta watch IceRocket more and see how it does against Technorati in other searches.

We have a good competition for once in the blog search space. I can’t wait for the day when automated copiers don’t get included in any search engines and trackback systems on blogs refuse their trackbacks.

What’s your favorite blog search? Why? Is your opinion changing?

Filed Under: 1
  • http://www.route66news.org/ Ron

    I noticed that a few months ago. I have a blog in which Google would find splogs that would take my content, but I noticed Technorati was more inclined to filter them out.

    Google is very good in a lot of things, but blog searches it is not.

  • http://www.route66news.org Ron

    I noticed that a few months ago. I have a blog in which Google would find splogs that would take my content, but I noticed Technorati was more inclined to filter them out.

    Google is very good in a lot of things, but blog searches it is not.

  • http://ieatmedia.wordpress.com/ ieatmedia

    Robert,
    I get the sense that either google blogsearch is not getting pings from your content feed– or perhaps pings from your comment feed are overwriting the content.

    If I do a “blogurl:scobleizer.com” search: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&num=10&c2coff=1&lr=&safe=off&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d&q=blogurl%3Ascobleizer.com&btnG=Search+Blogs
    I only get comment feed results. This doesn’t seem to be the case for other wordpress driven blogs with comment feeds which is strange…

  • http://ieatmedia.wordpress.com/ ieatmedia

    Robert,
    I get the sense that either google blogsearch is not getting pings from your content feed– or perhaps pings from your comment feed are overwriting the content.

    If I do a “blogurl:scobleizer.com” search: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&num=10&c2coff=1&lr=&safe=off&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d&q=blogurl%3Ascobleizer.com&btnG=Search+Blogs
    I only get comment feed results. This doesn’t seem to be the case for other wordpress driven blogs with comment feeds which is strange…

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ Robert Scoble

    ieatmedia: yeah, that’s a problem too that we need to work on, but it’s a separate one from the splogs that are showing up on Google.

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ Robert Scoble

    ieatmedia: yeah, that’s a problem too that we need to work on, but it’s a separate one from the splogs that are showing up on Google.

  • http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ Matt Cutts

    Robert, this may still be due to the RSS 0.92 issue we talked about where your older RSS feed with no links overwrites your nice RSS 2.0 feed. Toni sent me an email, so I’m hoping we can resolve it.

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ Robert Scoble

    Matt: what does having a splogger on there have to do with my feed? I think that there is a separate issue.

  • http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ Matt Cutts

    Robert, this may still be due to the RSS 0.92 issue we talked about where your older RSS feed with no links overwrites your nice RSS 2.0 feed. Toni sent me an email, so I’m hoping we can resolve it.

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ Robert Scoble

    Matt: what does having a splogger on there have to do with my feed? I think that there is a separate issue.

  • http://ieatmedia.wordpress.com/ ieatmedia

    Yeah.. splogging is getting intense. The Naik guy is simply republishing a mix of feeds (seems like he’s just some kid who doesn’t have a mess of ads yet). What is more sinister, is this blueboxsystem.com guy — and more importantly where he got the tools to do what he does.

    If you check out his “blog”, it’s littered with ads. The interesting phrases in the posts are “Original post by” and “software by Elliott Back”. Indeed, if we look at the link http://elliottback.com/about/ — this guy is a champion splogger enabler.

    A cursory glance at the results for the search:
    “Original post by” “elliott back”
    – >100k results for most of the engines. This guy’s tool is being used a lot.

  • http://ieatmedia.wordpress.com/ ieatmedia

    Yeah.. splogging is getting intense. The Naik guy is simply republishing a mix of feeds (seems like he’s just some kid who doesn’t have a mess of ads yet). What is more sinister, is this blueboxsystem.com guy — and more importantly where he got the tools to do what he does.

    If you check out his “blog”, it’s littered with ads. The interesting phrases in the posts are “Original post by” and “software by Elliott Back”. Indeed, if we look at the link http://elliottback.com/about/ — this guy is a champion splogger enabler.

    A cursory glance at the results for the search:
    “Original post by” “elliott back”
    – >100k results for most of the engines. This guy’s tool is being used a lot.

  • http://ieatmedia.wordpress.com/ ieatmedia

    Hm. I guess this isn’t a new thing – it’s already come up on your blog once before:
    http://scobleizer.com/2006/08/27/note-to-the-google-adsense-team/

  • http://ieatmedia.wordpress.com/ ieatmedia

    Hm. I guess this isn’t a new thing – it’s already come up on your blog once before:
    http://scobleizer.com/2006/08/27/note-to-the-google-adsense-team/

  • tim finin

    The 2006 TREC conference had a blog track focused on opinion extraction. NIST also asked for proposals for subjects for a TREC 2007 blog track and two proposals were made for slog detection, one from NEC and one from UMBC (“Blog Track Open Task: Spam Blog Classification “).

  • http://http//ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/ tim finin

    The 2006 TREC conference had a blog track focused on opinion extraction. NIST also asked for proposals for subjects for a TREC 2007 blog track and two proposals were made for slog detection, one from NEC and one from UMBC (“Blog Track Open Task: Spam Blog Classification “).

  • John

    Just have a footer with your name etc for every post. It would also be cool if you could add a link to comments to every post just like Engadget does (for us reading via Google Reader).

  • John

    Just have a footer with your name etc for every post. It would also be cool if you could add a link to comments to every post just like Engadget does (for us reading via Google Reader).

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