I put both of these blog search engines on notice. One improved. The other didn’t.

I thought Google had a bunch of PhD’s who cared about search quality?

Here’s my test. Any blog search engine that includes http://news.naikmichel.com in its result set is outright crap.

That’s a splog (it’s an automated copy of Scobleizer). Get rid of it Google, please.

Technorati wins!

Here’s the two tests:

Technorati. No Naik Michel.
Google Blogsearch. Has Naik Michel.

But, Ask’s blogsearch really is the winner here. I didn’t need to ask it to get rid of good old Naik.

Sphere is bad too. No Naik, but it has a different splogger. BlueBoxSystem.com.

UPDATE: Whoa, just checked out IceRocket and didn’t find any splogs, but lots of interesting little features like hot links up at top. I gotta watch IceRocket more and see how it does against Technorati in other searches.

We have a good competition for once in the blog search space. I can’t wait for the day when automated copiers don’t get included in any search engines and trackback systems on blogs refuse their trackbacks.

What’s your favorite blog search? Why? Is your opinion changing?

Are you a YouTube viewer who likes short, weird, videos of things going into a blender? Or, do you like Ze Frank? I love his holiday series on getting on MySpace. Will it Blend has a lot more viewers and is getting talked about on a lot more blogs, though (three times today alone in the 350 blogs I watch).

I like the little duckie, though. Hey, how about if they’d try to blend a little duckie? Ahh, now THAT is LINKBAIT! Ze Frank’s icon vs. the blender. Yowza.

Well, they did get close to putting a little duckie in the blender for Christmas. Heheh.

…is the DLP one from Texas Instruments that’s running on Engadget HD.

Why? Cause it’s actually three separate ad units that surround the content and the same ad is on all three. Also, the pattern and movement caught my eye. It also matches other advertising they are doing elsewhere (I’ve seen their TV ad as well). Well executed ad campaign.

Hey, I’m noticing that some things get into TechMeme for only a minute or so and then disappear. Hmmm.

I bet Gabe is watching for evidence of gaming and then removing anything that doesn’t belong.

The item in question, Photowalking, appeared for a few minutes (you can see it on the TechMeme River, but not on the main site) but then quickly disappeared.

Personally I would have removed it too. Thomas Hawk and I are friends. It got onto TechMeme cause both Thomas and me linked to it. We weren’t trying to get it on TechMeme, just both organically linked to it (we’re both involved).

Anyway, I’ve seen other evidence that a human is changing the results behind the scenes too. We’ve started talking about this at parties and, invariably, we think it’s good that Gabe’s doing that. Why? He’s good at picking what’s really interesting and what’s not.

Gabe, for his part, says that it’s his algorithms that decide whether something is worth staying on the page.

I wonder what the truth is: I’d love to sit with my camera and watch Gabe all day long and see what the system looks like to him. I bet he’s learning a lot about the linking patterns, and other patterns that are going on in the blogosphere.

By the way, it’s fun to compare the TechMeme river to my link blog. I notice that Gabe usually beats me with his algorithms, but that I can still beat him one out of every few stories. Why? Cause I am just looking at whether the post is interesting to me, not whether or not it has some inbound links. Funny enough usually within an hour the best of my “finds” are also on TechMeme cause they earn enough links from other people to get onto that page.

UPDATE: Now it’s back, that’s weird.

UPDATE 2: In related actions Digg is removing entire domains from its service.

UPDATE 3: It’s gone again.

UPDATE 4: Gabe says he doesn’t mess with the site in my comments and is on vacation right now with his family (but, says, that we should expect more of this kind of behavior).

I was one of those who noted that Donald Trump spent a ton of time on a recent show I was listening to flaming Mark Cuban. Today Mark bites back. Ahh, celebrity bickering. It’s almost as interesting as reading Valleywag or TechCrunch.

Mark’s taunt to the Donald? “Your blog sucks.” Among other things. Heheh.

Heather Champ is community manager over at Flickr and today we got up the latest Photowalking with her and Thomas Hawk.

Unfortunately one of my microphones was failing during this walk, so if you hear a pop or two that’s what’s going on. Sorry about that. We tried to edit out the worst of it.

This was an awesome Photowalk, though, in San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate park.

She’s also cofounder of the awesome JPG magazine.

Thomas Hawk has some photos of the day up on Flickr. More to come.

Heather shows off how she uses a Polaroid camera to make some gorgeous images.

Oh, did we sneak a little tiny short Seagate ad into the end of the video? Hmmm.