SEO

Good Bad and Ugly Social News and Blog Search Engines

Of late I have been spending a lot of my time scanning the web for news. Taking a look at the more popular social news and blog search engines I found that their search and category services are not up to par. Most social sites may be popular for pushing new information to the top of their own listing but they are terrible if you are trying to find it.

Rocks and Roses

To demonstrate what I am talking about lets take a look some of the popular places to get news and information about programming and web development. I will then throw rocks at or give roses to these websites depending on how well or poorly they do when I try and retrieve some information.

Digg.com

I am a coder and I like to see what other coders are doing regardless of what area of IT they are working in. Finding the type of information that interests me is a pain to find at Digg. The reason being Digg throws everything it the same ant hill. The categorization of material is too general and it is just too big. You can only pick one area that an article belongs to, tech news or programming. This does seem to effect the search tool which never seems to return correct matches even when using exact terms. Many of the articles posted show in a Google search because of all the heavy linking. But finding the same information via the Digg site is an impossible task.

Digg may be great as a marquee for links but it is not a place to go to search for information. Though not promoted as a search engine Digg should at least have one that works. Given all the popularity and money put into it Digg looks to be the first victim of Dot.com Bubble 2.0. Digg gets a big bag of rocks.

Reddit.com

I really try not to use the word "sucks" but when I think of or try to use Reddit this is the first thing that pops to mind. I personally like having a description of the link or website along with link itself. Web design is important even on a utility or service website. Reddit's design while not cluttered is not appealing or memorable in any way. The colors make for hard reading and the line spacing of the links are not very good for eye scanning.

The one good thing about Reddit that stands out is its search tool. You get good results everytime. This is amazing since the categorization of the programming area looks to be very weak. Regardless Reddit works where Digg fails and because of this I give Reddit a half dozen red roses.

Technorati

While Reddit sucks Technorati does not even come up to that level. Technorati to me is based on vaporware. Whatever it is running in the backend does not work and probably never will. Constantly billed as the poster child for Web 2.0, Technorati has only proven to be an embarassment. The idea was great but the implementation is only getting worse daily. Searching for a tag at this site will not get you fresh news or even links that are relevent to the tag used.

I find it hard to believe that Technorati is as popular as it is and wonder how it is holding it's place at the top. If Google Blog Search ever gets rolling well I hope they knock Technorati from it's throne. For potentially starting Dot.com Bubble 2.0 and putting a choke hold on the blogosphere I give Technorati a wheel barrel full of rocks.

Ice Rocket

IceRocket.com works. It just does. Searching, tagging, scanning websites everything seems to go just like it should. Ice Rocket does everything that you would expect from Technorati and does it better than just good. They are not trying to play on MySpace popularity or be something they are not by changing designs every quarter. The design is clean, uncluttered and user friendly with important extras right where you want them. A full bouquet to Ice Rocket.

Dzone

Dzone.com is a relatively new social news site that caters to developers. As a newcomer it is showing signs of strength and growth that the more mature services can be jealous of. The categorization of links is excellent. There are a few holes in the taxonomy but nothing that bothers most users. The the search works without a problem and tagging, that works, makes finding what you are interested in easy. It also nice that developer news is not being mixed in with tech news about the latest Segway and such.

The best thing about Dzone is that the creators are actually involved in it. They are not out schmoozing corporate execs and giving lectures. A dozen roses to Dzone.

The Danger of Information being lost

Search engines like Google are the life blood of the web and do a great job. But these type of search engines have a hard time delivering up-to-date news and information. The purpose of social searching is to connect you with new items and blogs that might be interesting, timely with a high relevancy. People who share common interests with you are better sources for "real time" information. The problem is that once this information loses its "Top Ten" placement in the social search engine then there is a high possibility it may be lost.

An example of lost information would be if a great article on PHP floated to the top of Dzone.com but this article remains buried under 500,000 websites in Google, Yahoo or MSN. Then the only good way of rediscovering the article would be to search for it at Dzone. This puts a lot of pressure on the management and adminstration of websites like Dzone to make sure that searching for information gives the same relevancy as when the item was first posted. Many are failing in this task due to a lack of technology or possibly because of the size of the information store.

Small and excellent or big and powerful

In general the lack of good search engine technology is making social search engines only half good. They also have limitations in that they cannot be too large. It seems that once a social search engine gets to be large or popular it starts to degrade in quality. One cure for this is to break off parts of it to smaller pieces so that the content can maintain it relevancy. Another more expensive way is to use known search engine technology to try and bring more order and relevancy to searches.

I personally hope that there will be more of the small clones to Digg rather than monolith information stores. This is because the small versions are in keeping with the spirit of social news and tag sharing. This means that once you get your Wordpress blog going you don't have to fight your way to the top of a website like Digg to be noticed. I also think that smaller search engines and social news sites bring with them more quality content and a better web experience.

Happy Publishing!

Discussion

One comment for “Good Bad and Ugly Social News and Blog Search Engines”

1. 

   Truth speaks, i use d zone, digg is crap and technorati..lala…

   Posted by Anonymous | October 24, 2006, 22:04

Post a comment

Name *

E-mail *

Web site

Comment