For whatever bizarre reason, blog and RSS search has proven to be difficult for traditional and even third party search companies to do well. IceRocket showed promise, but hasn’t really caught on, Feedster and Yahoo are merely ok, Pubsub has accuracy problems, Technorati when working is the best but can be spam/splog-ridden and Google Blog search which one would expect to be the best has been lackluster.

The most impressive blog search I’ve seen to date has been the Sphere It tool mentioned last week which does a pretty darn good job figuring out what the blog post is about and showing new blog posts. In fact, you can try it out by clicking the Sphere It link at the end of this post.

Disclaimer: I own IACI stock, which is the parent company for Ask.com. Originally I bought into ASK stock but when Barry Diller’s company bought them, I ended up with some IACI and some EXPEdia in a spinoff, the latter of which has done nothing but go down since the acquisition. I also own GOOG and YHOO stock but as regular readers already know the stock performance doesn’t stop me from calling out products/services/policies that sing or stink.

This morning I’ve been reviewing the new Ask blog search that I’ve been reading about the last 12 hours or so. It passed the blog vanity test where I put in my name and saw that it could find the blogs I currently contribute to and maintain. It even found the spreadfirefox blog that I’ve only posted to a few times. Found my Mac and php-scripts blogs, the latter of which still fails to exist in Google Blog search after more than eight months of being live (but admittedly not frequently updated). Also found the most recent post here on Starship Troopers.

Off to a good start. Time to try some of the other features like the rollover the binoculars effect:

At first I thought this was an intriguing and useful feature, but check out the headline above. When we roll over shouldn’t we see the post that is in the headlines? Instead it is showing the headline of the post being rolled over and the most recent post. This behavior seems buggy to me. They could easily have extracted from the RSS feed the post being rolled over.

The subscribe dropdown box makes it painless to create a subscription to Bloglines (of course), Google, Yahoo and Newsgator. A post selection allows easy posting to Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Digg and Newsvine.

Ask also added search to popular online RSS reader Bloglines. As far as online RSS readers, I’m still using Reblog — expect another post/update soon on my results there — and my current feed list is badly out of date with Bloglines. Results can be sorted by any time, last hour, day, week or year. A test search for “Ask blog search” turned up all relative and non-spam/splog results.

Others are saying
PR guy Steve Rubel thinks it is “unimpressive” and leaves him “largely cold” citing an “ipod” search that doesn’t return what he was expecting and features he wish it had.
Former Blog Herald top banana Duncan Riley is also unimpressed: “The blog search results are generally several days old, and although it presents them quickly, a quick comparative search of common keywords (including, naturally my own name) showed far better results at Technorati.” Riley also mentions a blog search service from Australia I wasn’t familiar with called gnoos.
Library clips: “The relevancy is based on subscriber numbers (so anything you write may be relevant to the search term by default, as you have lots of subscribers).”
Google Blogoscoped: “It’s hard to test indexing depth, but a quick comparison with Google Blog Search and Technorati shows Ask can hold up.”
TechCrunch (already linked above): “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.”
Tim Finn: “Bloglines knows how many subscribers each feed has and you can filter the results by requiring that each one have one, two or many subscribers … We think Bloglines is a great service and their enhanced search system makes it even better.”
SearchViews: “… at the very least Ask’s blog search is trying out unique ways to reduce junk results (we’re looking at you, Google) and determine relevance - even if all the kinks aren’t worked out on day one.”

Parting (brain) clots
Seems like Carly Simon might like the new Ask blog search which does well in the vanity department (btw, who was she talking about that was so vain in that song?!). By Ask using the number of subscriptions atop their search relevance algorithm I can see newer bloggers being more disappointed than those with hundreds, thousands and the select few with tens of thousands subscribers. Using the tool for my own search post efforts I like the idea of including subscriber results into the algorithm, but in searching for what others have to say, I’m not sure it will work very well.

What about new blogs with outstanding content and few subscribers in Bloglines? I have to wonder if Ask algorithm will find these blogs? Those bloggers who have been pushing to get people to subscribe via Bloglines have an advantage here. Hmm has 147 subscribers to one feed, and 95 to the other in Bloglines. I might add bloglines subscribe link to a few of our other blogs. Smart marketing, Ask.

Will have to use this some more to draw a better bead on it but I’m not feeling as negatively towards it as some of the comments I’m reading. Don’t think we’ve found the holy grail of blog search yet, but it’s better than some of the offerings out there. At least it’s trying something different. More searches required. What do you think?

• Google and iTunes plus other rumours and news
• French Maids TV
• First detailed look at Sphere beta
• Fair use for RSS feeds? Some bloggers divided over content usage
• Yahoo blog search hide and don’t seek yet
• Google blog search screenshot and test search results