Blog Search Will Soon Be Extinct

You may have noticed there's a big space race going on to build the best blog search engine. IceRocket (which now features blogs as its default) is one-upping BlogPulse is throwing grenades at Yahoo!'s getting ready to crash the party. Well, here's my prediction - blog search as we know it today will be extinct in a few years...if not sooner. For now, everyone in the Web search world is focused on relevancy, thanks to Google. But blogs and RSS are changing how we seek out content. Now people want to search for not only what's relevant, but also what's recent and popular (e.g. linked to). This is going to change how the Web search engines operate, particularly as more consumers begin to read blogs and subscribe to feeds. For Google, Yahoo and MSN to continue to innovate, they will not only need to work on as Chris Were describes, is no easy task. But increasingly, it will become what many searchers will crave. So who's going to succeed first in merging relevance, recency and popularity into a killer Web search tool? I am not sure. Perhaps this is why Google has been slow to get into the blog search game. They're waiting until they can change it. Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

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