I have long thought that social bookmarking and ranking sites like del.icio.us, digg, and StumbleUpon could be used to enhance current web search results. In March I argued that that StumbleUpon could easily be used for “enhancing or augmenting traditional search engine rankings.” Some people, like Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, already think that del.icio.us provides better search results than Google.

Rand argues that del.icio.us results are more timely, more focused on his demographic, higher quality, and more diverse. He concedes, however, that del.icio.us results do not always list the best first, sometimes lack relevance, and are either ten times better or ten times worse than Google depending on your view.

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Tags: internet, del icio us, del-icio-us, demographic, digg, google, reddit, relevance, search engine rankings, search-engine-rankings, social bookmarking, social-bookmarking, stumbleupon, traditional search engine, traditional-search-engine, web search results, web-search-results | No Comments »

Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs.

A few years ago, Web search was revolutionized by a simple but profound idea — that the relevance of a site can be determined by the number of other sites that link to it, and thus consider it ‘important.’ In the world of blogs, hyperlinks are even more significant, since bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs, which creates the sense of timeliness and connectedness one would have in a conversation. So Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging.

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Tags: internet, Bloggers, blog, bloggers, blogosphere, conversations, global conversation, global-conversation, hyperlinks, internet study, internet users, internet-study, internet-users, pew internet, pew-internet, profound idea, profound-idea, prominence, real time, real-time, relevance, study estimates, study-estimates, technorati, time nature, time search, time-nature, time-search, timeliness, weblogs | No Comments »