A post on TechCrunch today about blog search.
There is a big need for the equivalent of Google Page Rank for blog search relevance. Link analysis on a post just doesn’t work – the content is too fresh to develop meaningful link analysis results.
Didn’t Mike get the memo? PageRank doesn’t work anymore. It’s been gamed for so long that an entire industries have sprouted up around it: SEO, comment spam, splogging, googlebombing, etc…
He goes on to list the 3 main strategies being used for blog searching. The problem as I see it is that all of them give each blog an absolute authority value. (Or in the case of Sphere, multiple absolute aurhtoriy values: different values for different topics.)
This is based on the old mindset that the media is just “out there” and we readers somehow find it. But the truth is that every one and every blog is connected, and it’s these connections that matter. Is a blog authoritative for me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? That depends very much on who I am and whether people that I trust would consider the blog to be authoritative.
Bottom line: We’re all connected to each other –and every blog post, magazine article, or video clip– by fewer than 6 degrees of seperation. That’s where we will find a reliable measure of a blog’s authority for a given reader.