In a world of syndication and insta-blogging, the search engines with recency may start to trump those with relevance. Google is often acknowledged as fast, comprehensive and relevant -- but what about the refresh cycle?
Steve Gillmor
posted yesterday that the "syndisphere" may be replacing the "blogosphere." I've never seen the term "syndisphere" before, and when Dave Winer
tried to search the term in Google, he came up empty.
The trouble is, 30 hours later Google has
still not indexed this term -- but other search engines have. Technorati
shows 12 articles mentioning "syndisphere," which you might expect given that Technorati indexes the "world live web." But the more traditional engines also show it: MSN
has 10 articles,
Yahoo has 2, and
Jeeves has 2. Why is Google still at zero (as of the time of this posting)?
And more importantly for investors, is Google, the undisputed king of search, now playing catch-up with the competition for recency? Almost 4 years ago,
Eric Schmidt said the next big battle in search was over recency. Google's come a long way, but have they come far enough?
Update 4/11/05 20:03 PDT: About 7.5 hours after this original post, the results have changed quite dramatically. Google now blows the others out of the water, finding 61 pages referencing "syndisphere." MSN still has 10, Yahoo has 8, and Jeeves is still at 2. Technorati now has 18, and Bloglines is still at zero.
Update 4/11/05 20:19 PDT: In the last 16 minutes, Google's count has gone from 61 to 151 results, including similar pages. If you exclude similar results, Google still finds 32 unique pages.
Update 4/12/05 20:45 PDT: It's now been about 60 hours since the word "Syndisphere" was introduced, and here's the roundup: Google has 40 unique results, Yahoo has 17, Jeeves has 26, and Technorati has 26. MSN takes the prize for the most vapor results, reporting 476 in total but when asked to produce them, can only come up with 77 actual links. And Bloglines is still at zero.
Oh, and although Dave Winer
credits Dan Gillmor with the first use of "Syndisphere," that didn't stop Dave from registering
syndisphere.com!
