Evidently all that glitters in the Googleplex is not gold. The Google Blog Search tool is a glaring example. While I’m not a big fan of the results generated by it, there are others with a much harsher viewpoint. Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of the highly acclaimed online magazine, Salon, renders it as “becoming pretty much useless.”
Rather than focus on the negative, I'm stoked about the potential opportunity being presented here.
The University of Toronto, my Alma Mater, have a team in place working on this project right now.
BlogScope is a new search engine being developed by Professor Nick Koudas et al. The system is indexing millions of articles and posts from more than 30 million blogs, millions of YouTube videos, Wiki edits, online forums and social media sites several times a day. The upshot of BlogScope is that it garners such useful information as whether the content expresses positive, negative or neutral opinion. Market researchers and politicians will be salivating like Pavlov dogs already. But there's more. Results are sorted by factors such as age, gender, geography, and even popularity. Popularity is quite interesting in that years from now we can be looking back and seeing the important events associated with the economy, Iraq war, GM, Web hosting...whatever.
This is the kind of thing Microsoft should be working on feverishly. They have the resources, people and the erector set to make it happen. But they never seem to come up with the results. Well, Steve, if you can beat them, just fund them.
Some of my favorite things (and who's hosting them)
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