Today vs Yesterday's Web
People seem to interchange the terms RSS Search and Blog Search. (and even Web Search, plus Pubsub try and say they are 'Tomorrow's' Search !) To me, technorati.com, feedster.com, icerocket.com etc are Blog Search first, Web Link Search second, RSS Search third. If I want to subscribe to an RSS feed of Bit-Torrent files for latest 'Lost' Episodes, or DSC podcasts, feedster etc aren't that useful in letting me search for (and subscribe to) "RSS FEEDS" vs web pages with links to these feeds. But they are more useful if I want to understand recent conversations in blogs, although they still seem to generally exclude/limit many blog networks and long-tailers within (blogspot, spaces etc) in favour of A-C list bloggers, which is really annoying/sad/ineffective. I'm sick of blog search engines using a delicious tag as their manual filter for quality and recency on a topic. Its a shortcut, which will end up with alot of spam in delicious and not help todays search engine deliver better results.
But I've worked in search for many years, so I understand how hard, complex and demanding it is. Imagine selling a Porsche for free, and people complaining the quarter mile wasn't up to a Ferrari ? If only we could have an open source economy as buyers, but capitalist structure as sellers ! So this Doc Searls post is on the Money :
"Mike Warot is 'worried that the "buzz" signal might get tuned too far in the wrong direction. It would be tempting to say that the fastest is the best... We need to have reasonable speed of communication. It seems obvious to me that a blog-only search engine should be able to keep the response time down to a day or two, but it needs to do it for everyone, regardless of rank. I feel it's very important to make sure that everyone gets to participate in the conversation. When you use a search engine, you're looking for quality, and not merely the first post. (ala Slashdot) I'm not implyling that fastest is best — except at being fastest. If you're searching the Live Web, the part that is conversational and human and not static and not a set of "sites" that are "constructed" but instead is a vast pile of live journals, "buzz uptake" or speed to index matters. A lot. It's also the aspect of syndicated feed search that is most different from what Google and Yahoo do. It's important to remember that what the syndisphere — the World Live Web, or whatever else we want to call it — is very different in kind from the static Web of "sites" that all the mainstream engines have been searching since Lycos was a project at CMU and Infoseek charged on a per-search basis. We have journals here. We may not be live, exactly, but we're a lot closer to live than real estate projects that are "designed" and "constructed."
"..RSS search is still new, and still innovating and adapting all over the place, as what they search keeps changing too. As Mary Hodder is showing us, these engines are all doing different things, in different ways. The results, across the bunch of them, are far more varied (and for my money, interesting) than the results across Google, Yahoo and MSN. They differ most from the traditional search engines in one clear way: freshness. Currency. Live-ness. They excel in their ability to help users participate in conversations and to drive knowledge forward. For that, buzz uptake or time to index may be their most important distinction. It's just as important to note, however, that this is still one among many distinctions, owing to the fact that what they search has to do with people and time, and not just sites and subjects (though they're about that too).
And let's not forget that new technologies, practices, standards, topics and concerns keep coming along too. Tags, for example. Outlining. Microformats. Attention. Identity. Aggregation. Integration with other technologies, such as browsing and email. Plug-ins. The list goes on. All that stuff gets followed (or led) by the RSS-activated engines as well. That's another reason I don't look forward to the big traditional engines either buying up the RSS engines, or coming out with competing services. Independent developers are at the base of any healthy software ecosystem. The Live Web is still in its paleozoic. Let's let it grow naturally."
But I've worked in search for many years, so I understand how hard, complex and demanding it is. Imagine selling a Porsche for free, and people complaining the quarter mile wasn't up to a Ferrari ? If only we could have an open source economy as buyers, but capitalist structure as sellers ! So this Doc Searls post is on the Money :
"Mike Warot is 'worried that the "buzz" signal might get tuned too far in the wrong direction. It would be tempting to say that the fastest is the best... We need to have reasonable speed of communication. It seems obvious to me that a blog-only search engine should be able to keep the response time down to a day or two, but it needs to do it for everyone, regardless of rank. I feel it's very important to make sure that everyone gets to participate in the conversation. When you use a search engine, you're looking for quality, and not merely the first post. (ala Slashdot) I'm not implyling that fastest is best — except at being fastest. If you're searching the Live Web, the part that is conversational and human and not static and not a set of "sites" that are "constructed" but instead is a vast pile of live journals, "buzz uptake" or speed to index matters. A lot. It's also the aspect of syndicated feed search that is most different from what Google and Yahoo do. It's important to remember that what the syndisphere — the World Live Web, or whatever else we want to call it — is very different in kind from the static Web of "sites" that all the mainstream engines have been searching since Lycos was a project at CMU and Infoseek charged on a per-search basis. We have journals here. We may not be live, exactly, but we're a lot closer to live than real estate projects that are "designed" and "constructed."
"..RSS search is still new, and still innovating and adapting all over the place, as what they search keeps changing too. As Mary Hodder is showing us, these engines are all doing different things, in different ways. The results, across the bunch of them, are far more varied (and for my money, interesting) than the results across Google, Yahoo and MSN. They differ most from the traditional search engines in one clear way: freshness. Currency. Live-ness. They excel in their ability to help users participate in conversations and to drive knowledge forward. For that, buzz uptake or time to index may be their most important distinction. It's just as important to note, however, that this is still one among many distinctions, owing to the fact that what they search has to do with people and time, and not just sites and subjects (though they're about that too).
And let's not forget that new technologies, practices, standards, topics and concerns keep coming along too. Tags, for example. Outlining. Microformats. Attention. Identity. Aggregation. Integration with other technologies, such as browsing and email. Plug-ins. The list goes on. All that stuff gets followed (or led) by the RSS-activated engines as well. That's another reason I don't look forward to the big traditional engines either buying up the RSS engines, or coming out with competing services. Independent developers are at the base of any healthy software ecosystem. The Live Web is still in its paleozoic. Let's let it grow naturally."
posted by redbarren at 4:32 PM
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