untangling_the_web

DOCID: 4046925
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orange buttons are mislabeled, and should read 'RSS' or 'Atom' instead.
Strange, but true. 133
News aggregators (sometimes referred to as RSS aggregators) are programs
designed to read XML formatted content, which is very popular in the blogging
community. News aggregators retrieve RSS/Atom feeds and present these feeds in
an easy to read format. Bloggers and many news websites use RSS/Atom feeds in
XML format to publish information. Most news aggregators are downloadable
programs that need to be installed on your computer, but some are implemented on
websites.
There are now a number of RSS and blog search engines. Unfortunately, the
relationship between RSS feeds and blogs is not as clean and clear as one might
hope. While RSS search engines get their content from RSS feeds and not from
crawling the web, any type of website can distribute content using RSS. This.means
RSS search engines are searching more than just blogs. On the flip side, not every
blog uses RSS to distribute its content, so some blogs are not searched by RSS
search engines.
So what exactly do blog search engines provide that traditional news search engines
do not? What users often get from blogs are biased insights and opinions. For good
or for ill, blogs are somewhere between newsgroups/chat rooms and true journalistic
sites. Why use blog search engines? First, remember that traditional search engines
are the least useful for news or date-sensitive information. News search tools are
best for timely objective reporting. What blog search adds is diversified opinion
(sometimes useful, sometimes not) on virtually every topic imaginable. Also, even
good news search sites may index a limited number of sources whereas a good blog
site may get news out faster and more efficiently. However, for a number of reasons,
blog search engines' algorithms are not as good as general search engines'
algorithms at weeding out spam, so you will probably have to wade through a lot
of inappropriate and useless sites when using a blog search tool.
The list of blog search engines seems to be growing weekly, but I expect some will
fall by the wayside as others become more popular. I recommend trying several of
these tools because you will probably get very different results. In late 2006 Google
Blogsearch overtook Technorati as the most popular blog search site. Technorati
offers a somewhat different approach. The concept behind Technorati is that it
"watches" over 63 million weblogs, analyzing who is linking to a blog, website, or
news article. By entering the uri of any blog, website, or news article, users can see
how many blogs link to it, which bloggers are linking to that page, and what they are
saying about it. In essence, Technorati is a very simple website analysis tool that
133 "What is RSS/XMLlAtom Syndication?" Mezzoblue.com,
(14 November 2006).
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