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 – everything else is ignored.

Källström says that, in addition to the consumer-facing search engine, they’ll partner with large content news sites to show blog posts related to news content. This is something both Sphere and Technorati have had success with in the past, and the company can do revenue-sharing deals on additional page views. Content providers like it because it incentivizes blogs to link to their content (to get a link back). Twingly may not be able to compete with Sphere and Technorati in getting U.S. based partners, but he says he already has some deals with large European publishers completed.

The company has raised €1 million in a July 2007 round of financing from Servisen. They have seven employees. Look for a launch of their search engine in the next month or two.

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).

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.

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.

An example is here. They’ve also added a “Play Latest Episode” link to episodes to listen or download the podcast directly from 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.

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.

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 tag is placed first in the results. For Real-Time search to have its “ah-ha!” moment, these services must figure out a better way of adding relevance to results. This can be as simple as putting new content from highly linked blogs higher in search results (although this may tend to “lock in” older blogs), to creating highly complicated algorithms to determine relevancy of a given publisher to the particular content (so boingboing, the most popular blog, wouldn’t necessarily be given higher relevance if they posted on a new biotech company, something they don’t generally cover).

…tangent ends

Feedster Search:

Feedster search is good but not as good as Technorati is today. The reasons: integration of publisher tags into technorati results, and the fact that Technorati adds delicious, furl, buzznet and delicious tags to their results (see here for instance). Feedster doesn’t do this (yet?) and so the results aren’t as useful (same search at Feedster here).

Feedster search is, however, quite useful and has a very clean interface (something Technorati is criticized for). Feedster also has a toggle to show results by “Date” or “Relevance”, which is great, although relevance seems to be powered mostly by keyword counting at this point.

Screen shots of Feedster Search interface and results:

Feedster Link Search:

Feedster also has an excellent feature that shows link coming in to a particular URI. It’s useful for research and ego-searches, and generally to see who’s linking to what. The interface is very similar to general search.

Screen Shots for Feedster Link Search:

Feedster Tagging:

This is the really interesting new thing happening at Feedster. (note our editorial comments on the benefits and perils of user tagging in a recent profile of Celebrity Flicker – in general, you need to find a really good incentive for users to tag (see Delicious and Furl) or you end up with bad results).

Feedster tagging was announced by Scott Rafer, Feedster’s CEO, in a personal blog post on May 19, 2005 (link). The idea is to add a “Tag this” button at the end of a blog post where users can tag the post as they wish. The code to add this is available here (just do a view source on the page). You must be a feedster registered user and go through a captcha process to insert a tag. Here is the process visually (last one is the code needed to insert it into a blog):

Feedster Tagging Screen Shots:

This is an interesting and ongoing experiment with user tagging. However, currently the tagging results are useful for only one thing: viewing all tags for a post once you’ve added a tag. For now, the results are not integrated into Feedster search or anywhere else, and so there is almost no incentive for a user to tag content in any meaningful way. Thus, tags like “asshat” and “qrp2″ appear within the results. Not good.

I spoke to Scott Rafer about this issue yesterday and he says that they will roll out additional functionality in the future, including support for scuttle, the open source “delicious” bookmarking service. That will certainly help. But for now, the experiment shows that user tagging absulutely requires incentives or else users will not tag, and/or will not tag appropriately.

We’ve added the “tag this” feature to this post as an experiment to see what kind of data is generated. Have at it!

Management:

Scott Rafer – President and CEO
Chris Redlitz – VP Sales and Marketing
J. Scott Johnson – Co-Founder & CTO
Fran̤ois Schiettecatte РCo-Founder & Chief Scientist
Oren Michels – VP Engineering
Link

Links:

Fact Sheet
About
Corporate Blog
News
PR
Review, opinions
Financing
Feed of the day
Developer wiki
Help
Scott Rafer (CEO) blog (read this for his thoughts on the tagging product)
fusion94org on feedster tagging
Brian Del Vecchio on feedster tagging
Maruo Cherubini on feedster tagging
Fredonsomething on feedster tagging
PodTech interview with Feedster Founder

Tags: feedster, search, web2.0, techcrunch, scott rafer, tags, tagging