Feed searching – a small comparison
16:28 Thursday 15 Sep 05
In FeedDemon, I have a few searches setup that query the aggregators specifically, namely: Blogdigger, Daypop, Feedster and Technorati. I also have an MSN search. I did have an IceRocket search setup recently too but for a reason I forget now (I think it was multiple identical results) I deleted it. What follows is comparing each to each other for the same search term over the last 5 weeks:
- Daypop – last place by a long way. Finds very very little. (7 results in the last month)
- Technorati – 3rd place. Not as many results as Blogdigger, but they cover a wider area. By wider area I mean I’m finding more splogs in this feed (example being http://www.freearticlesforwebsites.com/ but blogger splogs don’t figure in this search at all.(~54 results)
- Blogdigger – 2nd place. Lots of results, and the odd annoying ad. (~100 results). No splog results though that the others got.
- Feedster – 1st place. Is looking in comments, has a broad range, lots of results. Way out in the lead on all counts, but this one does get the blogger splogs. Very useful though. (~180 results)
Hardly a proper test, the figures do not include any spam results – and the MSN search doesn’t count as it is searching the web and not pretending to do otherwise – but given the advent of the Google Blog search engine, I’m waiting to see how it compares to the others. Did I miss an aggregator ?
Comments (7) --
Read (1835)
1
Considering how much you love Google, how about Blogsearch @ Google?
17:19 Thursday 15 Sep 05
2
Heh … me and Google are mates ;)
It was their launch that made me look and count and I have added them already with the same terms and later I’m going to expand my searching for various other terms across Google, Feedster and Blogdigger. I’m watching them :)
17:57 Thursday 15 Sep 05
3
Thanks for checking out Blogdigger, and sorry the ads are annoying. We are still testing them, and hope to make them as relevant as possible. We’ve taken special care to avoid spam blogs, I’m happy that you noticed that. If you have any questions, please let me know!
04:07 Friday 16 Sep 05
4
Hi Greg – the reason the ad is annoying is because it’s full colour. That may sounds strange but because of that it ‘leaps out’ of the screen at me and in a reader that tends just to display text, it’s obvious / blatant. Whereas adsense (which I admit I block in firefox) has a range of colours so they can blend, this is full-on, in-your-face stuff which for me at least switches me off. Others may disagree though.
Either way, it’s a small price to pay for a very good feed :)
08:41 Friday 16 Sep 05
5
Interesting, thanks for the feedback. We’ve gotten a few comments on making the ads less image, more text. In some sense, we want you to see it, on the other, we don’t want to get annoyed. It’s good to hear it doesn’t overweigh the value of the feed, and we’ll take the size/color into consideration in the future. Thanks!
13:52 Friday 16 Sep 05
6
[...] In September, I did a small comparison of feeds. Back then, I liked Feedster, Blogdigger got no splogs and Technorati came in third out of the four. Since then Google has popped up, so I ran a feed looking for “Mark” on the 4 engines just mentioned. This is a huge image to try and show some results from FeedDemon: [...]
15:10 Monday 21 Nov 05
7
[...] In September, I did a small comparison of feeds. Back then, I liked Feedster, Blogdigger got no splogs and Technorati came in third out of the four. Since then Google has popped up, so I ran a feed looking for “Mark” on the 4 engines just mentioned. This is a huge image to try and show some results from FeedDemon: [...]
23:49 Wednesday 23 Nov 05