TalkDigger

TalkDigger - perhaps the first tool that could make the investigation into blog search engine result counts a little less painful. Fredrick Giasson (profile) has put together an interface which queries Bloglines, Technorati, BlogPulse, PubSub, Feedster, BlogDigger, MSN Search and Google. The results are displayed in a table together with some extra stats recording the trend over the last 7 searches. This makes it easy to compare searches on the same engines, but not searches between engines, though the intention was originally to let you track search result trends on each engine - according to the description:

Talk Digger will ask to major search engines who links to a specific URL. The results will then be processed and displayed on Talk Digger. There are 3 specifics things that will appear when you dig for a link:

1. Result. This is the number of links to that URL. If you click on that blue number, you will be redirected to the result page of the search engine and be able to know who links to you
2. Trend. This is an arrow that will shows you if the number of results for that search is higher, lower or the same as the previous one. This is really effective when you wake up the morning and that you need to instantly see if someone as talked about your blog during the night
3. 7 last digs trend graph. This is a graph that shows you the evolution of the results returned by the search engines in the last 7 search requests

One thing that the tool shows as a side-effect of its live polling of the search engines is the time taken to respond. It is interesting to see how the horses come in (I'm assuming a multi-threaded implementation of course).

Comments

[Fred]

Hello Mr. Hurst,

Thank for that post. I confirm you: you can use it to compare the search speed between search engines. It is now one of my favorite hobby ;)

I was impressed to see that Technorati is far much faster than Bloglines at that task. If you check popular blogs like Scoble's or Rubel's, you will see a big difference.

How it works is simple: it send all the requests, and then wait for the answer. As soon as it arrive, I analyse/display it.

Thank,

Salutations,

Fred