Monday, February 13, 2006 5:00 AM
Over the last week or so, I have been reading with interest some of the reports of various financial analysts who cover
Google and
Yahoo!. With the recent downturn in the stock prices of both companies, there has been rampant speculation as to the whys and hows of this negative move. One of the items I have seen mentioned by a couple of different analysts is search results becoming less relevant due to the increase in weblog entries in the results. Of course, one may also argue that search results are more relevant because of weblog entries.
Whatever your feelings on the subject, I noted with specific interest the mention of beta efforts in Yahoo's search to separate out blog "hits" in search results to a different section of the results page. I have not personally seen this in action yet, but if it turns out to be true it does make me wonder what Yahoo is thinking (and whether Google is pondering the same).
The baseline question remains how to best sort, filter, search, etcetera through billions of web pages and documents in the most efficient possible way. Weblog content is simply adding to these billions (probably more like trillions) of documents/pages. Indeed, the very success of weblogs also gives rise to new challenges to dealing with weblog content.
For now, it seems we are all in a wait and see mode. But keeping an eye on beta releases at the big search companies is always a good idea. They just might point to the future of weblog search. Stay tuned.