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What’s wrong with Blog Search?!

There are some great blog search engines out there today like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Sphere. However, they all have the same flaw; they don’t block spam blogs.

Not one of the three blog search engines listed above do a very good job, if any job at all, of blocking blog spam. Do a search for some sports gear, like “wrestling shoes”, and there is a great probability that more than a few results in the top ten are spam blogs.

Why is this? Is it that hard to filter out spam blogs? Maybe. If so, what I suggest is a flagging system much like Blogger.com has. If you think a blog is bad, flag it. Then someone (or so we think) will evaluate it and decide if it should be removed or not.

I know that filtering out spam is probably a big headache, but it’s something that is tarnishing each one of these blog search engines.

It should be quality over quantity, not the other way around.

One note: I have contacted Sphere and Technorati recently. Sphere said they were thinking about adding some sort of user defined spam reporting and I’ve yet to hear back from Technorati.


2 Responses

  1. Ian Kallen says:

    Our combat with spam is lonely work; the lapses are much more visible than the successes. We’re very concerned with spam, we keep a lot of spam out of our indices. Yes, while trying to bring as much of the web to the surface in as real time as possible, junk gets in. However, we keep a lot of junk out and we’re working vigorously to improve our systems for distinguishing the junk. Thanks for your ideas, I’ll have a look at the “wrestling shoes” results!

  2. Thomas says:

    Thanks for the comment Ian. You are with Technorati right? I’m a big fan. 🙂 And it’s really great to see you are keeping up with blogs and responding to people like me. I appreciate it.

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