At first glance, blog search as a category is oversaturated. Ok, at second glance, too. Not only did Google enter the market directly in late 2005, they’ve also increased the rate that they index blogs and other regularly updated sites for core Google search. TechCrunch, for example, is now indexed multiple times per day by Google, and new posts are often available in a normal Google search within minutes of posting. Most people today say the best blog search engine is, simply, Google.com. And there are many competitors. The Comscore chart below shows the relative traffic of the major ones – Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ask Blog Search, Sphere and IceRocket. Feedster is gone, although there are additional smaller engines like Zuula and Blogdigger as well. Every one of those companies is U.S. based (note that Paris-based Wikio has blog search as well as a Digg-like service). Now Europe will have it’s own blog search engine – Twingly. I met Martin Källström, the company’s CEO, at the DLD conference in Munich earlier this week. Their focus, he says, will be to have a spam-free engine (something none of the others can claim) at the cost of inclusiveness. And at least at first, the engine will be focused on European blogs. Twingly’s search engine hasn’t launched yet, although I do have a screen shot of what the home page will eventually look like: Twingly already has a product – a nifty screen saver that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written. The new search engine will use some of the back end technology they’ve developed for the screen saver – mainly their ping server (see here for our overview of what ping servers are) and existing index of blogs. The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. How are they doing that? Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed → Read More
You don’t hear the name “Feedster” very often any more, other than the occasional joke about how they managed to execute even more poorly than Technorati. I frankly assumed they were among the walking dead – the place startups go when they don’t have pressure to shut down but don’t have enough money or human assets to do anything interesting, either. The last time we wrote about them was February 2006, more than a year ago. But it appears that Feedster is alive and kicking – they launched a major redesign today, and a new widget product that allows searchers to quickly add search results to any website. They also have a new search engine, they say, that helps reduce spam. It looks like there are a few hiccups with the widget – I created and embedded one but it won’t load properly. My opinion: When a company gets this sick and falls this far behind, and the market they are in is now dominated by Google, it’s generally a good idea to return what’s left of capital to shareholders and let the employees move on to more interesting projects. Nothing good is going to happen with Feedster. I’m not particularly impressed with their search results (this will not pull users from Technorati or Google Blog Search), and few people will be interested in the widget (not that Technorati releases stuff like this all the time, they just don’t talk about it). → Read More
Feedster’s product response to Jeremy Zawodny’s attack post was to announce improvements to the site and service yesterday. They’ve sped up search and simplified the look and feel. I don’t want to pile on, but I will. This is too little too late. Former CEO Scott Rafer now heading up Wireless Ink (very cool startup), and co-founder Scott Johnson is at his new startup Ookles. I’m not saying the Scott’s could have saved Feedster. Maybe they just saw the writing on the wall and knew it was time to leave. Feedster has too high of a mountain to climb to get back in a leadership position. And new, well funded competitors are on the way. I’m not betting against Jeremy on this one. → Read More
Feedster has updated their Top 500 List of Blogs. Scott Johnson, Feedster’s CTO, writes about it here. The first list was published in August. The new list incorporates recent links and has changed substantially from the previous version. In particular, they’ve added user tagging and a tag cloud to assist in search/find. The tagging interface is in Ajax (with captcha to reduce spam). I spoke with Scott Johnson last night about the new list. They’ve taken big steps to remove spam blogs and links, and will soon be tying authority to links to further refine the list. The Feedster list is very focused on recent links in, looking back only two years and giving additional weight to more recent links. The tagging feature is an interesting way to find blogs in the list. They’ve added a tag cloud on the right sidebar for easy navigation to specific types of blogs. For instance, click on “celebrity” and get that type of blog. Great way to drill down. And finally, Feedster will be adding “Import into Excel for Analysis” and an OPML export of the feeds. → Read More
Scott Johnson announced Feedster Podcast Search tonight on his blog. An example is here. They’ve also added a “Play Latest Episode” link to episodes to listen or download the podcast directly from Feedster. → Read More
Big news at Feedster. Mitsui & Co., Ltd. made an investment (size undisclosed) in Feedster today. “We are pleased to have Mitsui as an investor,” says Chris Redlitz, Feedster’s Vice President, Sales and Marketing. “Feedster is already a market leader in blog search and content syndication. With this investment we continue to distance ourselves from the field and prepare for global expansion.” The Feedster PR quote was from Chris Redlitz, VP Sales & Marketing, not Scott Rafer, the CEO. That should have given everyone a clue as to the next piece of news, which followed a couple of hours later. Scott is stepping down as CEO and the Feedster board is searching for his replacement. Scott is not wasting any time in starting something new – he became chairman of startup Wireless Ink today. Scott, you created one of the founding pillars of web 2.0 and we salute you. Good luck with your travels and your new venture. No news on the new feature rumor from yesterday. → Read More
Somebody pointed out to me today that Tony Guntharp, a senior software engineer at Feedster (previous Feedster profile here), wrote this on his blog today: Work So I’ve been busting my ass the past few weeks getting ready for a new feature launch for work. I’ll post more updates more frequently after the 6th including screenshots and thoughts from World of Warcraft. Could be nothing, could be something. Email to Tony went unanswered, although it’s only been a few hours. This could also be about World of Warcraft – the post isn’t totally clear. Nothing on Scott Rafer’s Feedster Blog as of 9 pm PST on 9/6/05. → Read More
Company: Feedster Founded: March 2003 Status: Founded by Scott Johnson in March 2003. Merged with RSS-Search founded by François Schiettecatte in June 2003. Announced Series A funding on June 2, 2005 led by Selby Venture Partners. Other investors include Omidyar Network, members of the New York Angels, Kevin Hartz, co-founder of Xoom, Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite and Jotspot, Josh Kopelman, founder of Half.com, Scott Kurnit, founder of About.com, Mark Pincus, founder of Tribe.net and Support.com, and Narendra Rocherolle, founder of Webshots. Link Location: Feedster, Inc. 116 New Montgomery Street Suite 605 San Francisco, CA 94105 Voice: 415-348-9119 Email: info@feedster.com What is it? Feedster is one of the original real-time search engines, and has added interesting new services along the way to further evolve the web 2.0. The services we will profile are search, link search and their new user tagging feature. They also have a nascent RSS reader and other services (like “feedpaper” (which we just can’t figure out), job search, and feed search for sites. Most of these other features are available under advanced search and My Feedster. In their own words, “Feedster is first and foremost a search engine, however unlike a general web search engine like Google, Feedster includes only a certain type of content, called feeds, which provide many advantages.�? “Feedster is a rapidly growing Internet search engine and advertising network that provides timely and meaningful information to consumers and large Internet sites in need of targeted media. Feedster provides a fresh index across over 8 million feeds several times per hour, adding millions of new documents daily. Feedster benefits from the ways that blogging is changing the Internet’s basic building blocks – from unstructured web pages to structured documents.�? A slight tangent starts here…. While attending the vertical leap conference on search yesterday (we will post about this event separately), a lot of questions came up regarding “old search” v. “new search”. Old search (the gold standard is Google) prioritizes results based on “relevance”, which is largely determined based on links into the content. Lots of links = high relevance (this is simplified of course). With real-time search (blogging, news, etc.), link analysis breaks because there is not sufficient time for links to materialize and become indexed. Real-Time search engines like Feedster and Technorati (Profiles here) generally use “freshness” as the determining factor of relevance. The most recent post including your searched keyword or → Read More
San Francisco, CA
