The changing landscape of (blog) search

Steve Rubel writes about the changing landscape of blog search. Google killed it, he claims, and it seems plausible.

For one, there is good reason why the attractiveness of search engines like technorati has faltered:

The improvements are nice, but I have to admit that I don’t use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it’s not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn’t tell me who’s an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007. […] While we still use vertical search engines today to dig through news, blogs, video, etc., their days are numbered. The lines are blurrier. Google News, for example, has lots of blogs. More importantly, the big web search engines are going becoming sophisticated enough to make an educated guess as to what information you’re seeking. It won’t care if it comes from the live or static web. It will serve up relevance and soon time-stamped sorting.

Is there anything that will put an end to Google’s dominance? Probably not. But it was never within their own fields that big monolithic companies were beat. IBM still offers some of the best servers. Microsoft is still a quasi-Monopoly in PC OS.

Whoever „beats“ Google will have find a totally new field of activity.

By the way, I love to take sneak preview of what Google is toying with…