Assigning some sort of quality to real time search is necessary. Tracking incoming links to a particular post doesn’t work because, well, since this stuff is real time there is no time to track links. Memeorandum does track blog post links in near real time, but with a very small index of blogs. Tracking this across the entire blogosphere is much more difficult.

Robert Scoble points out that Technorati has taken a shot at the problem, though. They’ve quietly released an “authority” slider to allow results to be filtered. See results anywhere from all blogs, to just blogs with hundreds of links. They assign authority to a post based on how many links a blog has. The image below shows the slider at the top and the text within the imagedescribes how it works.

The slider is a bit buggy but works. This is another good way for people to sort results to find what they are looking for.

Steve Rubel uses this as an opportunity to talk about how everything has devolved into a big popularity contest. He’s right…but what is a better way to determine authority other than links into a blog?