Technorati Keyword Searches - PubSub, Feedster have had this from the beginning and they are still better

Thu, 2005-01-06 00:19 — Roland

LATER: Dave Sifry left a great comment to this post. He has some excellent points; I will re-try Technorati again and hope I get better results with the 2005 version. Regardless, I will post a followup here.

I must be suffering from baby induced sleep deprivation :-) but didn't Feedster and PubSub have this from the very beginning? In other words, isn't this a feature Technorati should have had long ago? Regardless, my ongoing unscientific comparison of a Technorati versus PubSub versus Feedster search for "roland tanglao" reveals nothing has changed: PubSub has the best (fastest and most accurate and free unlike Technorati which only has three free watchlists) results followed by Feedster (again free) with Technorati being in the rear. I really don't understand why people continue to use and hype Technorati. The folks at Technorati are very cool and very friendly but I still find PubSub and Feedster much better.

DISCLOSURES: During PubSub's brief existence, I have exchanged emails with them and have become friends with Bob Wyman, the CTO and Salim, the CEO. I also have met Scott Johnson of Feedster and think he's a cool and smart guy.

From Sifry's Alerts: Get your keyword watchlists here!.:

QUOTE

I'm proud to announce that Technorati has just launched our new Keyword Watchlist service, which now allows you to track and subscribe to live searches on keywords and phrases. For example, say you're interested in keeping track of the recent rumor that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. You would start by going to Technorati and typing in a set of search terms like:

("six apart" OR sixapart) AND (livejournal OR "live journal")

This will give you an instantly updated stream of posts from blogs around the world that are talking about both SixApart and LiveJournal, in a post, using a variety of spellings.

Note the results page, however - Underneath the title of the search, you'll notice a link that says, "Make this a Watchlist". Click on that link, go through the login process (or create an account if it is the first time at Technorati), and you'll get a link to that saved search to put into your favorite RSS reader
.

UNQUOTE

Roland's blog

Comments

Thu, 2005-01-06 00:42 — David Sifry (not verified)

re: Technorati Keyword Searches - PubSub, Feedster have had thi

Roland,

Thanks for the comments. Of course, feel free to use whatever search you like. However, here's some comments:

First, When you do a search using Technorati, you'll get every post since the beginning of our tracking of posts for that keyword or phrase set, not just the results from the moment you created the watchlist. I like PubSub, but they don't give any indication of what happened before you create your search. Also, I think you'll find that Technorati's results have the fastest updates.

Second, have you tried comparing results from advanced searches (using booleans and the like) when using Technorati watchlists compared to others? In our testing, we've found that our advanced searches are more accurate.

We also provide links to the cosmos of each blog in the watchlist, as well as the relative authority of each blog, so you can get a quick indication of how authoritative or influential the blogger is. I personally find this quite useful.

Technorati is also indexing over 5.3 million blogs, both blogs with RSS feeds, and those without RSS, which is orders of magnitude more than some other services that only track RSS feeds.

And of course, your criticism that Technorati should have had this long ago is quite accurate - we've been growing like crazy, and building out all the features we've wanted to build out has taken time. We also had some scaling and response time issues in the past, and we really wanted to make sure that we nailed the most critical issues with the service first. Note that we still have bugs (e.g. we are still seeing some link count glitches), and we're still going to continue to fix them at the same time we're rolling out new and useful features for our users. And there's lots more to come.

So please, continue to use the fine services from Feedster and PubSub! And please continue to try out and use Technorati watchlists as well. May a thousand flowers bloom.

I'm always happy to discuss this further as well, please feel free to drop me a line at dsifry at technorati dot com, or my direct line is 415 846-0232...

Dave
Dave

Thu, 2005-01-06 00:49 — Roland Tanglao (not verified)