Live search comparison

Last week Starbucks announced a new drinkable chocloate beverage called Chantico. Beginning last Saturday consumers could purchase a six-fluid ounce cup, creating many conversations across the blogosphere involving the new drink and the newly formed category of “drinkable chocolate.” This new product also provides a perfect opportunity to play the role of the marketing department of a Fortune 500 company tracking the reaction to a new product introduction.

How should we measure the reaction to a product that has been on the market only four days? With live search companies of course! I will use search engines Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub to compare the coverage of the keyword “Chantico” over the past 21 hours. Why 21 hours? I submitted the search to PubSub at midnight today PST so in the interest of parity I will restrict search results to the publish date given by each search engine.

Results

Technorati
Total results
21
Last result
22 minutes ago
PubSub
Total results
20
Last result
11 hours in the future
Feedster
Total results
3
Last result
6 hours ago
Summary

Technorati provided the most results and the most recent example in this case. PubSub provided LiveJournal entries missed by Technorati. The best solution is to continue to use both services to catch all references. Feedster had a horrible showing.

Last published source (geeky)

Feedster had very few results, but their most recent value was closest to the value published on their page. Their publish date value for the most recent entry is eight minutes — 2005-01-11T23:10:50Z compared to the actual entry of 2005-01-11T22:02:14Z.

Technorati’s linkcreated value for the most recent entry in its watchlist was 2005-01-12T02:44:22Z while the page text referenced an equivalent value of 2005-01-12T05:02:29Z, a three hour difference. According to the weblog the posting was at 2005-01-11T07:52:41Z.

PubSub provided a most recent issued element value of 2005-01-12T08:31:19-05:00 and a server time of 2005-01-12T05:26:28Z. The same entry had a issued value of 2005-01-11T21:36:00Z in the feed.