The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

Steve Rubel nails it when he says "The product leaves me largely cold" about the new Bloglines and Ask.com blog search. I found it a step backwards from the existing Bloglines search, which I had already written off as mostly broken, at best. But, of course, the blogosphere is ripe with BOGUmeister reviews about how cool this new search is. I have to wonder, if these reviewers even tried it before they wrote their blog entries.

http://www.ask.com/?tool=bls

My favorite part of the old Bloglines search was Bloglines Citations. This returned all the blog entries that were pointing to me. This same query now returns all sorts of weird stuff. If I do a search for simply kbcafe, then it also returns mostly my blog entries. I image that it's matching on the <link> or <author> element :-)

After democamp, a few of us geeks hanging at the local pub wondered what was happening with Bloglines and remarked that it had degraded considerabily since the Ask.com take-out. Now, we know what they've been up to and I'm personally disappointed.

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I agree with your assessment, Randy.  In a vanity search, it seems to find some pages that I never knew existed, but misses many important ones, and includes a ton of pages from my own blog.  Only useful as a supplement.  Do not take on an empty stomach.
--SterlingCamden
I understand they want to innovate, but they also have a ton of well known, publicised issues with their product that they seem to refuse to fix. Maybe they should work on that before they build broken search engines?  
randy,
i'm not a big bloglines user so i don't have much experience with its previous search efforts. nevertheless, i found it fairly useful - at least more so than technorati, which consistently generates poor search research. just one man's opinion.....

mark

Mark,
I can't disagree there. Technorati is no better.

Randy

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