The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

Earlier this month and before Google launch its blog search, I documented all blog search engines capability of finding new links. When Google blog search was released, I was amazed how much better it was then the other engines. Since then, Technorati has improved, IceRocket has improved and maybe now we have a four-way challenge with Bloglines (the best last month) and Google (the newcomer). Let's start it again. For any links discovered on posts tomorrow or later, I will document and aggregate the results to see who's the best blogosphere search engine, this month.

Enumeration of competitors

  1. Bloglines [http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com]
  2. KBCafe [http://www.kbcafe.com/links.aspx?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com]
  3. PubSub [http://www.pubsub.com/site_stats.php?site=kbcafe.com]
  4. IceRocket [http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com]
  5. BlogPulse [http://www.blogpulse.com/search?boolean=link&link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kbcafe.com]
  6. Technorati [http://www.technorati.com/search/www.kbcafe.com]
  7. Feedster [http://feedster.com/links.php?url=www.kbcafe.com]
  8. Blogdigger [http://www.blogdigger.com/linkSearch.jsp?link=www.kbcafe.com]
  9. Google [http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=link%3Akbcafe.com&scoring=d]

Am I missing anybody? Splogs or self-referential blogs will not be included in the results.

Results:

Notes:

  • Bloglines is aggravatingly slow.
  • KBCafe found the first link thru an IceRocket metasearch. As such, the first link was found via two services, but IceRocket was the real source in both cases. IceRocket 1, everybody else 0.
  • Feedster is painfully slow too! And the Javascript errors are annoying.
  • BlogPulse seems to be broken today.
  • After day 1, Bloglines 3, IceRocket 3, Technorati 3 and Google 1. Everybody else 0.
  • When I find new links with PubSub, it's always linked via the homepage. Finding the link is difficult. Quite often, it's gone, or maybe it was never there (false positive).
  • I'm surprised by the amount of new links I'm finding with Technorati. Of late, I get next to nothing from Technorati.
  • After day 2, Bloglines 7, Technorati 6, IceRocket 4, Google 2, PubSub 1.
  • BlogPulse seems to be jammed until Friday, when new results start rolling in by the dozen (mostly splog and self-referential).
  • Technorati has improve the most this last week.
Reader Comments Subscribe
Did they change something? I don't see what's different?

Randy

John Tropea,
The last time I did this test, Feedster found zero links, which confirms that they do exclude posts from your own blog and all others too ;-) 

Randy

Thanks Alex! Yes, I considered MSN, but unfortunately it's feed search is too limited. In this case, I was doing a back-link search. Does MSN have a back-link feed search?

Randy

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