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You may have noticed there's a big space race going on to build the best blog search engine.

One day IceRocket (which now features blogs as its default) is one-upping Technorati. The next day BlogPulse is throwing grenades at PubSub and so on and so forth. Everyone's trying to pick a winner, just as 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 personalized search - the current holy grail - but also acquire or replicate specialized search engines like the ones above. What I want is to be able to sort all my Web results by date as well as relevance and link popularity. Right now I can't. Doing so, 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.

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.