Live search comparison
Tonight I was thinking about the importance of the number of indexed weblogs when choosing a search service. PubSub claims to track 6.6 million sources, Technorati claims to track 4.7 million weblogs, and Feedster claims to track 1.1 million feeds. What can the target audience of these services do with this information? I decided to do some comparative research from the point of view of a marketing department tracking the buzz around their new advertising campaign.
Kevin Kringle is a digital word-of-mouth marketing campaign created by Best Buy and SMG Reverb. The marketing campaign is officially under a month old so it should be a good proving ground for live searches. The search phrase is “Kevin Kringle” in all cases.
22,500 results
Last mention 5 days ago
Yahoo! — 10,300 results
21 results
Last mention 3 days ago
8 results
Last mention 5 days ago
2 results
Last mention 11 days ago
Still waiting on results from PubSub. Feedster’s results page shows 100 results even though there are only 21. Feedster phrase search did not display correctly on my results pages.
The big search engines (Google, Yahoo!) performed better than I thought they would although you cannot yet subscribe to a search from a big search engine. Despite errors presenting the data, Feedster appeared to have the most results and most recently updated listings. Technorati and Feedster could both do a better job with on-page promotions of persistent search capabilities.