I’ve fallen in love with Techmeme, but I really would like to be able to search for certain topics. For instance, I wrote yesterday on the MacBook Pro’s battery and how it’s a story that is getting mainstream press due to the Flickr pics of the battery failing.
When I first mentioned to Jeremiah that I wanted to know if any bloggers were talking about it, he suggested I go to Technorati and find out. A quick search of Technorati produced these results:
2800 results, page one had only four mentions of the actual problem. The rest were sites that were selling the MacBook Pro or their battery or splogs that just happened to have included the word in their meta. Now, granted I did search for MacBook Pro battery rather than something tighter like MacBook Battery Swell. The results there were 12 matches, 4 posts that were not relevant. Technorati was, for the most part, returning relevant results, but not results that fit my needs.
I still was just getting ‘this is what happened to me’ posts rather than commentary, which is more what I wanted to see. That’s why I wanted to search Techmeme. Considering the cleanness of the index AND the fact that the people on the site are influencers, I expect that results there would be much more relevant to what I was particularly looking to find (ie commentary vs conversation).
Jeremiah then suggested I search Google for 'techmeme+macbook pro battery' and I got just what I was looking for…
I got blogosphere commentary on a story, rather than blogosphere conversation. Now, don’t get me wrong, blogosphere conversation is good when I want to read a personal account. However, when I want to see commentary from a journalist blogger on a certain item as it relates to their niche (ie business, marketing, accounting, media, etc.) of expertise, I can’t settle for chatter.
I’m wondering why TechMeme doesn’t offer search. It can’t be that difficult to put search on the page, I mean they’ve created a clean blog index and that’s got to be infinitely more difficult. That’s why I’m assuming it isn’t the difficulty level that is stopping the creators from putting search on the page. There must be a specific purpose as to why they are not doing it. I’m just wondering why?
I completely agree with you as far as TechMeme goes. I am trying to find some way to utilize that site more fully, but without a search function, I can’t really do much. I have no idea why they don’t allow searches….
[...] Robyn has recently fell in love with TechMeme, a conversation aggregator. [...]
Gabe left a message on Jeremiah’s site that answered this question. To para, I think it’s a plan, but it won’t be next week.