Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Rupert Murdoch seeks dysfunctional search engine | The Register: "With a billion dollars to spend on his new Fox Interactive Unit, Rupert Murdoch is going shopping.
Last month he picked up web community Intermix Media for $580 million, and followed-up by adding insider sports news network Scout Media for $60 million.
This time search sites Technorati and Blinkx are in the frame - the LA Times reporting that News Corp. is in negotiations with the latter. But just as with the rumors about News Corp. buying Skype, it hardly rings true...
...However even in their infancy, both Blinkx and Technorati have struggled to cope with the basics of the task at hand. Technorati no longer performs minute-long searches which produce no results at all, a hallmark of its first two years - but it's had its clock cleaned by Bloglines (purchased by Barry Diller's empire earlier this year) and other search sites which find many weblogs Technorati can't see, or is confused by. While Technorati has struggled to scale, it's focussed on gimmicks such as 'tags' - this year's gift to spammers. The grown-ups, Google and Yahoo!, will soon collar this market and Yahoo! has already acknowledged that it's working on a weblog search engine with, we hope, new user interface ideas.
A similar cruftiness dogs Blinkx, which like Technorati, owed its early favorable write ups to nepotism, back-scratching and groupthink.
Blinkx prematurely dropped a desktop search gadget onto the web last summer, one of the buggiest pieces of software ever to hit a consumer PC. It doesn't like to mention it now, but this irate email to a national newspaper was typical of the feedback we received, too..."
Last month he picked up web community Intermix Media for $580 million, and followed-up by adding insider sports news network Scout Media for $60 million.
This time search sites Technorati and Blinkx are in the frame - the LA Times reporting that News Corp. is in negotiations with the latter. But just as with the rumors about News Corp. buying Skype, it hardly rings true...
...However even in their infancy, both Blinkx and Technorati have struggled to cope with the basics of the task at hand. Technorati no longer performs minute-long searches which produce no results at all, a hallmark of its first two years - but it's had its clock cleaned by Bloglines (purchased by Barry Diller's empire earlier this year) and other search sites which find many weblogs Technorati can't see, or is confused by. While Technorati has struggled to scale, it's focussed on gimmicks such as 'tags' - this year's gift to spammers. The grown-ups, Google and Yahoo!, will soon collar this market and Yahoo! has already acknowledged that it's working on a weblog search engine with, we hope, new user interface ideas.
A similar cruftiness dogs Blinkx, which like Technorati, owed its early favorable write ups to nepotism, back-scratching and groupthink.
Blinkx prematurely dropped a desktop search gadget onto the web last summer, one of the buggiest pieces of software ever to hit a consumer PC. It doesn't like to mention it now, but this irate email to a national newspaper was typical of the feedback we received, too..."
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