Google has something to learn from Icerocket Search

Blog search has been a favorite topic and this blog has reviewed various tools that let visitors search your blog, just like they can when they visit the big-deal corporate sites. Technorati and Blogdigger were my favorites until I got an email from Blake Rhodes, CEO of Icerocket for my comments on their recently launched Blog searching service.

I did some quick searches on Icerocket and saw a lovely curry of Technorati, Blogdigger and Blogpulse in Icerocket Blog Search. It is a combination of some of the best features of existing blog search engines plus something unique like the date specific search.

Here are some of the best features of Icerocket, though all are not necessarily unique.

1. A search engine with inbuilt Julian Date converter - You can search for blog articles posted posted today, last week or even between specific dates something which even Google doesn’t allow yet. Google, please incorporate this feature on your advanced search page.

2. Icerocket too has a Blogs Trend Tool just like Blogpulse - Inface, the Icerocket interface is an exact replica of the Blogpulse interface. I hope it’s equally efficient as well.

3. Just like Google, every search term is linked to Answers.com definition. And as part of the deal, Answers.com send its “blog search” traffic to IceRocket.

4. The Blog Search engine is lightning fast and gives the most revelvant results. And each result has a Technorati style cosmos and Blogdigger style feed specific action bar (like Focus or Exclude a feed) - See the snapshow below.


And yes, there is still room for improvement.

1. There is no option to limit your search to a specific blog (or site) on the Advanced search though there’s a simple hack - just add “+blogid:blognumber” to your search query.

2. IceRocket doesn’t remove duplicate posts from the results. Say if you have a Feedburner feed that is actually a mirror of your Blogger feed, each result will show up twice. Try to search for Amit Agarwal.

3. There’s definitely a bug which I prefer to call as “The +Blogid -Blogid bug” - Say, I search for “Microsoft” and focus the results on a blog. Then my search URL would look like microsoft +blogId:1605153. Now in the results, if I try to exclude the same blog from the results, my new search URL becomes microsoft +blogId:1605153 -blogId:1605153 - This gets confusing for Icerocket and it returns no result.

4. There is no way to sort the results by date or “rank by influence” - a popular feature of Technorati.

5. Tags are missing.

6. There could be a Citations link with every result - that should who all have linked to that post.

But inspite of all these shortcomings, Icerocket Blog search really rocks. After the recent upgrade of Technorati, it has become slow and somewhat buggy. Icerocket looks like a nice alternative - it is fast and indexes the most recent posts. And I can subscribe via RSS to the results.

And don’t miss the list of Celebrity Blogs - Before, I was unaware that Pamela Anderson maintains her own blog.

Icerocket team has done a splendid job. But how did Blake Rhodes manage to find my email ?