YodelSearch: A New Blog Search Engine

I've just seen a hit on my blog from yodelsearch.com. There is not much out there about this new search engine. From Tony Conrad's blog:

I co-founded Yodel Search because I thought there was a good chance we could make a blog search engine that worked better than current offerings. We’ve got a nice small team working together. I’m joined by co-founders Steve Nieker and Martin Remy, along with advisors Matt Mullenweg, Mary Hodder and Toni Schnieder.

Mary Hodder is well known in the blog (search) space and has recently been commenting on the need for methods to distinguish communities of blogs around interests (and to avoid the tyranny of the uber lists). Toni Schnieder is with Yahoo! Matt Mullenweg is probably best known as the founder of WordPress.

Megan Kamil (who claims to be a 'young entrepreneur in the Bay Area') comments:

I frequently try to search google to find lists of the best technology blogs, or info from blogs in general - nothing very useful ever comes up. Best of luck to you in your new venture!

Which suggests that YodelSearch is aiming at filling a hole in the current blog search space - the ability to search for blogs (not posts) and rank them by relevance (not time), which matches well with Hodder's discussion.

Silcon Beat quotes Tony's about page as saying:

Yodel’s mission is to create a great search engine for discovering high quality blogs. We’ve been in a dark hole the past several months developing an authority algorithm that will help more authoritative blogs surface to the top of a results page. I got the idea through discussions with Toni Schneider and my experience with Oddpost (a webmail client with integrated RSS aggregation features), an investment that I led that was sold to Yahoo! at a handsome return.

but the text on the page has now changed.

So what is the story? A new blog search engine that has identified a possible opening in the current feature set and which is being advised by Hodder, Mullenweg and Yahoo! This gives you a blog thought leader, a blog content tool leader and a representative from the search space. This is a big deal.