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.
What’s different about Best of the Web Blogs is that each blog is reviewed by an editor. The human review process means there are a lot less blogs, but the quality is higher.
It will be interesting to see how much of an effect pro/con the human review process has. So many new blogs are created each day, there is no reasonable way to manually review a significant number of blogs. However, I think many people are frustrated with spolgs (spam blogs) and might be satisfied with a smaller universe of higher quality blogs to choose from.
Scoble did a little write up about BOTW blog search as well and thinks BOTW blog search “needs more work, but it shows some promise.”
Lee Odden is President and Founder of
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marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
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