Technorati

I conducted a search on the term "library 2.0" using the "Exact Phrase" feature under the heading "Advanced Search." It yielded 7,091 hits. When I searched for the same phrase using "Tags," the first thing to come up was a "Quick View." Looking under each of the tabs shown in "Quick View," I saw that it had returned 22,555 posts and 333 blogs. It also yielded videos and pictures but did not provide a count of how many were returned under these categories. For the most part a lot of hits were relevant.

Next, I searched for blogs on Westies. I found information that I had not seen when I had used other blog search engines as a part of the Library 2.0 project. However, I had to sift through a lot of extraneous sites to do so and even some of the "relevant" hits returned did not impress me.

I guess that the topic of your search plays a role in the results. Maybe technology bloggers are more serious (Is that the word I want?) about their topic as I found a lot less junk with the Library 2.0 search than the Westie one.

An interesting side note....I searched for Technorati on Wikipedia and found that Technorati does not search My Space blogs. Also, according to the entry, it appears that Techornati concentrates on images rather than blogs. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati)

RSS Pt. 2

I explored several other RSS feed search tools (Topix.net, Feedster, Syndic8.com, and Technorati) today. I found Topix.net to be the least useful to me. The site covers local news and, since the place where I live is small, there isn't much news to report. Feedster returned more hits on my search for Westies and West Highland White (terriers) than Syndic8.com, however, most of them were not relevant. All of the hits on Syndic8.com were on my topic. Finally, Technorati provided the most returns of all although it also had the highest amount of irrelevant links. A couple of potential advantages of Technorati is that it allows you to do an advanced search and to limit your results by language and "authority." In the case of my search, limiting to the highest authority didn't help.