“Developers looking for a blog search API often find the APIs that do exist are providing a variation of a web index,” says Rahul Hampole with the Yahoo Search BOSS team. “We decided to take a different approach. Yahoo! developed a custom blog index where the relevancy is specifically tuned for blogs. This allows us to provide you a wealth of data such as the provider, the author, date of post and in certain cases, contextually relevant terms associated with the article.”

“By their very nature, web indices used for blog search cannot provide the complex functionality that developers demand,” explains Hampole. “For example, try finding a commercial API that will give you all the blog articles written on ‘Yahoo’ in the last week sorted by date. Yes, I know, I couldn’t find one either. Developers can now make that exact query on BOSS and build a rich powerful application. As always, BOSS developers get maximum flexibility on the display of this data.”

Yahoo has set the pricing at ten cents per 1,000 queries. Users can apply to show advertising when they sign up, and those who have already signed up for BOSS can use Blog Search immediately.

Yahoo says it has hundreds of developer sites using BOSS for millions of queries each day. ” We have seen fascinating applications in social, mobile and on the web that are using the service,” says Hampole. “Our goal is to nurture and grow this ecosystem by continuing to add new services and helping you monetize your offering.”

He says the team’s next goal is to “shake things up in mobile,” adding that they’re not planning on a BOSS OS.

Earlier this year, Yahoo launched BOSS v2, which brought a number of new things to the table (including Yahoo Search advertising).

Another significant change to Technorati is to its Top 100 Blogs. "Until today, the top 100 blogs were determined based on unique links from other blogs during the previous six months," explains well-known blogger Michael Arrington. "The top list was fairly static. Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and “other inputs.” The result, says the company, is a lot more volatility in the lists as blogs surge up and down."

In addition, Technorati also categorizes blogs by a number of topics, and provides lists of top blogs by topic.

One might expect a site like Technorati to have suffered as a result of the "Twitter revolution," but according to data from Compete, Technorati.com is bringing in more unique monthly visitors than it was a year ago. To me, this is a good indication that traditional blogs are just as in-demand as ever.

The redesign still appears to have a few kinks. For example, I am having a hard time subscribing to RSS feeds, and am instead receiving error messages. Kinks are to be expected with new designs, however, and they will likely be worked out.

Following are a few past WebProNews interviews with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, in which he talks about standing out in the digital age, his first year at Technorati, and more.

This is the topic being discussed in a thread at the WebmasterWorld forum. "There are a lot of mixed emotions; I’m on the first page but in the wrong place," says one WebmasterWorld member, who started the thread on the issue.  

Why would Google do this?

Another person suggests the inclusion of commenting on a site, but the original poster says their site doesn’t allow comments. A different user suggests that RSS feeds could be the reason that Google is viewing sites as blogs. At Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz also discusses this as a possibility.

He does note, however, that Apple.com has RSS feeds, but is not included in blog search results, so there must be more to it than that. Many sites that aren’t blogs are included in blog search though, he says. He also makes another good point.

"Should webmasters be upset if their sites are included in Google Blog Search?" he asks. "Can it hurt?"

If you’re getting into blog search results (particularly in Universal results), you’re opening up your site for additional traffic. If your site isn’t a blog, there’s a good chance users will figure this out once they click through to it. Hopefully the content on the site is at least relevant to the user’s query.

Conversions are the goal. Visibility is the strategy. Unfortunately, like most strategies, they take effort and paying attention to detail. The web may be taking a huge turn toward social, but search isn’t going anywhere. You need to be found where people are looking.

1. Ranking in YouTube

As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

A few tips mentioned a while back at SMX West include:

- An accurate and descriptive title

- Make sure your description is just that – descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.

- Descriptive keyword tags

- Avoid keyword stuffing

It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips discussed at SMX were:

- Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags

- Include the word "Video" in your titles because people do search for it.

- Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.

- Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.

 - Encourage participation by enabling everything.

- use meta data

- use captions and subtitles

- use watermarks

- use Google Maps integration

There is plenty more info about ranking on and with YouTube here, and more tips on how businesses can use YouTube in general from Product Manager Tracy Chan here.

More tips for ranking in YouTube? Please share.

2. Ranking in Google Image Search

Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, "Other tips to double dip in image SEO include":

-  Add images to your Google Local Business profile

- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

The following clip has a lot more useful information about Google Image Search:

More tips for ranking in Google Image Search? Please share.

3. Ranking in Google News

Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, "News page views are up to trillions monthly." More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:

- Only indexes articles three days old or less

- Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description

Google itself posted about some facts and myths pertaining to ranking in Google News searches about a year ago. In the interest of not making this article excruciatingly long (or at least even more so), I will just link to it. But you should definitely read it if you are serious about incorporating Google News into your strategy.

More tips for ranking in Google News? Please share.

4. Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords. 

For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”,  “Music, Nicholasville KY”,  and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:

- Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less

- Local Groupings

There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:

- have pages, mentioning your area of service

- directions on how to reach your office

- use landmarks ("after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower" that’s three landmarks altogether)

- have ccTLD (country-specific domain – google.ca, for instance)

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea has a great article about Authority Documents for Google’s Local Search that is a must-read in this category.

More tips for ranking in Google Maps/Local Search? Please share.

5. Ranking in Google Blog Search

Back in ’07, Slawski started a thread in the Cre8asite Forum looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:

- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of "high quality" blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank

Some negatives he mentioned:

- if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
- if post content differs from feed version
- If content includes a lot of spammy words
- duplicate content
- if posts are the same size
- Link distribution
- If posts mostly link to one site

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also looked at Google’s Blog Search patent application and pulled some takeaways from that.

More tips for ranking in Google Blog Search? Please share.

Wrap Up

It’s important to note that results from other Google search engines often turn up in regular Google results, in case you need any extra incentive to pay attention to them. This is part of Google’s Universal Search. There are lots of opportunities to get your site found in Google other than just regular web search. And this is just organic stuff. There are certainly paid search opportunities to think about too.

Which of these do you see the most traffic from? Tell WPN Readers.

Got more tips for ranking with these engines? Share your knowledge.

For example: for every story I write, I run at least one query through Google Blog Search as a way of making sure that my existing sources aren’t either entirely off base or woefully incomplete.  It’s not a bad thing to have additional evidence of those research trips.

Or, to go beyond useful into sanity-saving, this development led Nathan Weinberg to examine his search trends and realize that he never, ever rests.  Should Weinberg not change his habits, he’ll now at least leave behind a more complete virtual path that might mean a lot to sleep deprivation scientists.

In any event, it’s good to see Google begin to track Blog Search histories – this was a rather obvious hole in its approach to record-keeping.

Google China Gets Blog Search Engine

Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen appears to have been the first (and so far, only) person to notice the change; he also caught on to the ways in which the blog search is limited.  “As other Google offerings in China, this one is self-censored (on some searches, like a search for ‘censorship’, the bottom of the page in italics disclaims that some search results are not shown in compliance with local laws, regulations and policies),” writes Lenssen.

He then continues, “Also, upon entering certain queries like human rights or tiananmen, the result doesn’t properly display at all, but shows a place-holder message instead.  However, it seems like something is still being rolled out here, and I’m not sure if this place-holder page is only triggered by ‘sensitive’ queries.”

So, to continue our car metaphor, Google’s Chinese blog search appears to be equipped with some sort of sick, sputtering three-cylinder, but the power plant is at least running, and repairs may be underway.

For Google’s sake, let’s hope that’s the case; a Reuters report published earlier today lists its market share as being 35.3 percent behind Baidu’s.

Compared to the tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars that bigger companies throw around on a weekly basis, I realize $3 million’s not much.  Yet compared to Lijit’s previous financing round – in which just $900,000 was raised – this will do nicely, and Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, writes, “As a result of the funding, we are looking for some more people to augment the team (we’ll double it).”

But you may well ask what it is that this team does.  “Lijit allows you to easily create your own search engine, which searches your blog, blogroll, bookmarks, photos, and more,” according to the company.  “By offering the Lijit Search Wijit on your blog, readers can search all of YOU and receive amazingly relevant results.  In turn, Lijit gives you detailed statistics about the searches performed, such that you can better understand and serve your reader community.”

Sounds interesting, right?  And Lijit appears to work as advertised.  One (very) minor complaint is that, when representing “all of YOU,” things can get a little crowded – take a look at Fred Wilson’s page, for example – but that’s not Lijit’s fault.  Also – and this is more of an observation than a criticism – the displayed “recent searches” can get a little strange (Wilson’s profile has been searched for “dog,” “breasts,” “diabetes,” and “music”).

All in all, however, Lijit is looking pretty good, and that fresh $3.3 million isn’t likely to make matters worse.

Hat tip to Michael Foroobar.

“In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site,” Sifry said on the Technorati blog. “No more.”

A search will now deliver all the possible social media results Technorati can find for a query. Blog posts, videos, images, and podcasts are all in play when doing a search. Sifry credited tagging for driving this change:

This is being facilitated by the phenomenon of tags and tagging, which helps to unify and organize the rapidly expanding world of user-generated media. As more and more publishing tools support the use of tags, the better we are able to assemble collections of social media based on the interests of our users.

Pure blog search has not been abandoned. People who only want blog post results for a search, without the extra “bells and whistles” of multimedia in their results, can get them at s.technorati.com. That pulls up a search page with the bare necessities: search box, language options, and choice of blog authority.

The speed of the blog-only search will be a joy for people who have long complained that Technorati had become bogged down over time. It’s screaming fast now.

Sifry also promised that more updates and innovations would be forthcoming this year. The site has experienced substantial traffic growth, with people demanding all kinds of results. If they can pull off those future changes with the same skill as they did with speeding up search, we will be very eager to see what’s coming next.

Anyway, I was talking with a number of people and I heard that Technorati’s blog search quality had seen a fairly large improvement lately and was better than Google’s blog search again. It’s hard to test blog search engines unless you know when an event started and can count up the good links and count up the spam.

There’s no way I can — alone — test out the search engine’s quality.

So, thought I’d open it up to all of you. Which engine is now better? Why? Give us some things to test out and reproduce what you’re seeing.

Here, I’ll start. It’s Videoblogging Week this week. So let’s compare both for “videobloggingweek2007.” That’s a top search on Technorati, so it should bias pretty well for Technorati, right? Let’s see!

Technorati for videobloggingweek2007. 147 results.

Google Blog Search for videobloggingweek2007. 76 results.

I didn’t see any obvious spam, did you? I think there might have been one on Google’s results, but it’s hard to tell spam blog, or splog, from actual real blogs anymore.

Also, I didn’t notice any duplicates on either service, did you? How about on the searches you’ve tried? It does look like Technorati has pulled ahead again in this race. The UI on Technorati is certainly ahead of Google’s, especially with the little chart of how many mentions a term has gotten. Search Technorati for EMI, for instance, and you can see that it really spiked today because they announced non-DRM music which got a lot of bloggers all excited.

So, try some searches of your own. Which engine is working best for you?

Comments

Tag:

Don’t hold your breath on the State of the Blogosphere report, though. The Blogosphere’s all grown up now and has changed its name to the Live Web, a post-pubescent transmogrification that includes blogs, photos, videos, music, events, and tags. Sifry’s State of the Live Web report is due out later this week.

Sifry called the growth of tagged media pages "phenomenal."

"As the use of tags becomes more ubiquitous across all forms of social media and the publishing platforms that support them," he said, "they’ve become the lingua franca of the Live Web – the way in which people all over the world indicate what topics or issues are top of mind and guiding self-expression."

Business has been good for Technorati. In March, the site attracted over nine million unique visitors, a 141 percent increase over the previous quarter. Online metrics firm Hitwise recently reported that Technorati was again, after a brief slip to Google’s Blog Search, the most used blog search engine.

Google’s been a much tougher competitor in the blog search world lately, ever since the company integrated a Blog Search link with Google News.

Even that extra homepage exposure hasn’t been able out-promote the word-of-mouth cred Technorati’s been enjoying recently. Robert Scoble indicates that Technorati has been the talk of South Park – the one in San Francisco, that is.

The Scobeleizer is challenging his readers to pit the two engines against each other and share results. Early testing shows Technorati bringing back twice as many results as Google.

"It does look like Technorati has pulled ahead again in this race," he said. "The UI on Technorati is certainly ahead of Google’s."

Speaking of UI’s, Tantek Celik also brings our attention to three new Technorati widgets, which can be embedded on a blog or website, designed to give live information about the current top searches, top tags, and best authority (authority’s important for linking).