Emad Fanous

So BlogPulse is something built by the Intelliseek. Their site looks like they are a marketting company but my history with the people who work there was actually related to local search and their ability to crawl sites and attach a taxonomy to them. BlogPulse seems to be not only a proof of concept of their ability to do this, but also a pretty cool utility (that’s not to say I hadn’t identified what they did well and what they didn’t do well when working with them, though). Anyway, the reason they come up again is because of their press release about the impact of blogs … kind of like a guide to marketers that is being touted as the first report of its kind.

It got me thinking about technorati and I came across this which made for an interesting read.

So I decided to run my own tests, but from a users (as opposed to a content-provider’s) point of view to see what gave me the best results and here is what I came up with…all of these are generalizations based on my 15 minute test and existing knowledge based on experience:

• Technorati’s searching is slow compared to blogpulse (I hate that “Searching the world live web”).
• Technorati returns more matches for my search terms but both return the most relevant results at the top.
• I like BlogPulse’s graphing of trends and their “zeitgeist” but more research will need to be done to test the accuracy of all of these tools which depends on their technology (i.e. mapping of synonmys or data scrubbing/matching/manipulation which doesn’t look like it is happening but trends seem to correspond amongst different words even if it makes the absolute number inaccurate).
• Technorati puts a smaller version of the zeitgeist on their homepage and seems to be more up to date (where blogpulse seems to update it periodically and output it into a static file).
• Technorati allows you to register with the site (but I couldn’t easily find a place that describes the ebenfits of subscribing). Once logged in, though, they allow you to add weblogs to your watchlist, add profile info and photos to your weblog (once you claim it), add searching using their engine onto your weblog (though most ASP and downloadable versions already have this built in), etc.
• Technorati allows you to search by URL in addition to keywords whereas blogpulse only allows by keywords.
• Blogpulse has advanced searching features where you can constrain your searches by all sorts of things such as by weblog owners, date range, boolean queries, etc but the advanced search seemed slower…but testing technorati out showed they support boolean queries from within their search box as well.
• Technorati tells me when I have no results but Blogpulse tells me they are showing results 1-0 of 0 results (a minor annoyance).
• Technorati supports various developer programs that offer information and APIs to their tools (and as a perl developer, I love all their available modules
• A few more precursory searches showed more relevant search results for more temporally-aware terms (i.e. current events such as the pope’s passing) and blogpulse appeared to be more relevant whereas technorati simply returned any result with “pope” in it which included some posting mentioning “pope” and “Britney Spears” in the same post.

What do I think? Well, I think each has their purpose and they don’t perfectly overlap so I’d use technorati to develop against and find realtime iformation. But I would use blogpulse to look up trend analysis over longer periods of time and have them graph it.

Pretty interesting stuff. I encourage people from both companies (or any reader) to offer corrections if I missed anything. Remember to take this with a grain of salt as I literally spent 15 minutes with it.

UPDATE: I noticed jeremy had an article up asking what if intelliseek bought technorati

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