Is it just me or do blog search engines deliver horrible results? Possibly someone out there can point me to a blog search engine that doesn’t include so many spammy blogs in their database. Technorati is certainly not there yet. Clearly, some sort of blog value ranking would help.

However, that’s not the worst of it. As much as 50% of Technorati’s search results point to foreign language posts! If I wanted results in Spanish I wouldn’t have searched from their english language website. I searched for the term Google Adwords and 10 out of the first 20 search results were from blog posts in a foreign tongue!

Here are a few more search examples:

technorati - 6 of the top 20 results were non-english
france - 9 of the top 20 results were non-english
laptop - 7 of the top 20 results were non-english
php - 13 of the top 20 results were either non-english or giberish
blog - 8 of the top 20 results were non-english

This is a problem you would think could be solved rather easily. Why doesn’t Technorati create foreign language versions of its search engine? I’m sure there is a market for it. It makes zero sense to include non-english blogs in its main database.

Update: Technorati founder David Sifry corrects me below regarding the fact that Technorati does have foreign language search engines and does in fact offer a way to filter non-english results out.

However, why doesn’t Technorati make english only results the default when you go to their site. Most major general search engines such as Google and Yahoo don’t require you to change a setting after the first result in order to make the results all english.

But at least Technorati does indeed have a solution to remove those foreign language results!

Posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 3:44 pm. Permalink