I wasn’t originally going to write about the made over Blogsearch from Google because quite frankly it’s as boring as hell. Yada yada yada Google blah blah Blogsearch snore – is about as much enthusiasm I could find for the updated offering from Google. Some folks in typical tech blogosphere fashion had declared it as the big Technorati killer when it first showed up on the scene and we can see how well that plan worked out.
Then yesterday Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb came out with the totally expected post of how this revised version of Google’s Blogsearch was now the newest Techmeme killer.
If that is the case then it’s going to be a slow death by air rifle because that is going to be the only thing next to a post like Marshall’s with enough hot air to do the job. The idea that something like this revamped Blogsearch is going to be any threat to Techmeme is ridiculous for the principal reason that they are directed at two different markets.
For as much as Gabe might be wanting to expand the horizon of Techmeme the fact is that it is the playground of the tech blogosphere whereas Blogsearch in typical Google fashion is aimed shotgun fashion at the everyday web surfer.
Marshall isn’t the only one though to proclaim Google as the Techmeme murder as Duncan Riley over at The Inquisitr says pretty much the same thing. He sites Quantcast numbers for Techmeme as part of his reasoning and that Google by its 800 pound gorilla in the room attitude will inevitably bury its new competitor. Maybe Duncan will turn out to be right, but given the fact that Technorati survived the assassination attempt by Google’s first run at some sort of blog search chances are that Techmeme will do the same.
As much as people might like to bitch and complain about Techmeme it still is the place for tracking hot topics in the tech blogosphere. Even after looking over Blogsearch I gotta say I don’t get whatever principals; or algorithms, that are the basis of how google is displaying results. If you look at the page you will see a small box of text beside each of the entries in the listing that contains the number of blogs that are linked to the listed item and how long (in hours) those links have been in place.
The problem is that you can have one blog with say 150 linked blogs with ‘x’ hours and then right below it; or above, another item with more or less number of linked blogs and in the same number of hours. There is absolutely no apparent rhyme or reason for placement in the displayed list and that is utterly confusing.
When it comes to the interface differences between the two the ranking style isn’t the only difference. With Blogsearch it sports the same UI ideology as most of Google’s properties do and I gotta tell you this pastel blue crap is getting really old and boring. Not only that but even with the information displayed in Blogsearch it is limited in its presentation. Whereas with Techmeme it is – as Mathew Ingram says a little more dynamic in feeling
For one thing, I like the fact that Techmeme.com is kind of dynamic – even if I don’t really understand how it operates. Blog posts go from being a sub-link of a sub-link to being a headline post, then disappear altogether; others form their own sub-group and then get reabsorbed, and some form headlines without any links at all, which makes some people mad. It may be a black box, but I kind of like that. Fred Wilson says that he likes it because it’s more personal than just an algorithm.
Personally I don’t use Techmeme all that much and I’m really not sure how much I would even use Google’s Blogsearch but I really think that this use of killer in a headline as Digg bait is getting as old and boring as Google’s passion for pastel blue. So before we rush out to the murder scene of any service I would suggest that we wait for the autopsy before declaring Google the killer of anything because as Mark Evans quite rightly points out Google has an even better track record of putting their own products into palliative care instead of killing anything.
One has to wonder sometimes what exactly goes through the minds of some smart people. One minute they can be saying completely intelligible things that have us in awe of their lucid thoughts and the next they sound like they couldn’t connect the dots if their lives depended on it. Sometimes the disconnect is so painfully obvious that you just sit there scratching your head and wondering WTF were they thinking of. Other times you stop for a second and think maybe – just maybe they are having fun with you and forgot to smirk or something before realizing that no they really have made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
