Online Marketing Blog

Since the posting of the big list of search marketing blogs, several people have contacted me about having created a custom search engine via Google Custom Search Engine using the list of blogs. So far there are:

• Alister Cameron - Search Engine Marketing Search Engine
• Marc Ohmann - Internet Marketing Search Engine
• Joe Williams - Search Engines According to Category: SEO, Social Media, Black Hat, Linking, Web Design. Lots of work went into this one!

Update:

• Megite “River of News” format - TopRank Blog News
• Eurekster Swicki (A-M only) - Search Marketing Blogs

I realize with so many blogs, about 300 now, that it’s not practical to try and read them all every day. That’s why we’re working on developing a “river of news” format so you can see a stream of posts broken out by hours of the day.

The long awaited Ask.com Blog Search Engine has finally launched. There are two iterations: One for Ask.com in the form of another right side option. The other within Bloglines.com. The Ask.com blogs and feeds search is directed more towards general users. The Bloglines versions offers more advanced options for “prosumers” as Kaushal Kurapati from Ask.com called them in our preview call.

Key features include the use of Ask.com “expert rank” which breaks the web into communities and defines subject specific link popularity. This is combined with Bloglines.com subscription data to determine relevance in blog and feed search results.

Another key feature is the quality of content. Ask.com Blogs and Feeds search is available in 20 languages with 4-6 million articles indexed per day. There are 1.5 billion articles indexed overall. Blogs and feeds that are indexed only include the feeds that Bloglines users have subscribed to.

I signed up for a Sphere beta account late last year. I played with it a bit and like many “Web 2.0″ apps, found it interesting, still in development and then I moved on. However, Andy Beal recently made a post about Sphere, so I checked it out again.

Today, Sphere V1.5 has been released and is publicly available. What’s new in this version:

• custom range histogram;
• sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
• top queries this hour/ this week;
• RSS for search results;
• community feedback buttons throughout the site;
• expanded related media verticals including podcasts (Yahoo! API), books (Amazon API), and photos (CNET Webshots API);

Yesterday at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference I ran into Brian Prince, CEO of Best of the Web (BOTW.org), who clearly have plenty of fans as evident from all the black, long sleeve t-shirts worn by conference attendees. In fact, they ran out the first day of the conference and had to get more.

A few months ago, BOTW.org launched a new blogs directory. Yesterday, they took the next step and added search to the directory. You can search by posts, tags or blogs.

I agree with Brian that the blog search engine problem really hasn’t been solved yet. Technorati and Google Blog Search are the two I use most, but the emphasis on recency as an indicator of relevancy muddles the search results. Plus there’s so much blog spam. To their credit, Technorati has released some new features recently, including favorites and a “relevancy” slider tool, which shows they are continuing to improve.