The Blogsphere could be seen as a place, an environment, where blogs are connected one between the other. But, I will enlarge that definition, the Blogsphere is the set of web sites where an interaction between the author of the site and his readers could interact and develop discussions.

Then, Talk Digger is a tool that helps you to find these discussions, join them, and follow their evolution in the Blogsphere. This is a simple idea, but how interesting.

Some days ago, Ivan A. Illyn explicated that fact on a comment he leaved on my post: Talk Digger: who is linking to you. He said:

Correct (Imho) slogan & positioning TalkDigger is: “Join discussion everywhere” – something like that.

• You go on any web page
• You like it
• You push Bookmarklet and go discuss or read opinion commenter’s!

Even if you don’t have your own blog – you’ll find similar minded people anyway.

This is New web-surfing method!

And he is right. This little idea is really attractive. It explicit the fact that every Internet users could be interested in using Talk Digger, and any search engine that have the feature to know who is linking to a specific URL. The specific act of searching these back-links is an act for socialization; it tells that that person want to know what another person think about a specific thing.

Without knowing it, I developed a tool that tries to explicit a fact that I wrote about in a previous post: The Blogsphere is becoming a huge distributed discussion forum.

Finally:

• If you want to start discussion in the Blogsphere, then wrote something and ping search engines with tools like King Ping
• If you want to search and join a discussion around a specific web site / web page / blog / blog post / whatever that is an URL, then go to that page and click on the Talk Digger’s bookmarklet, and check who is talking about it
• If you want to follow the discussions around that URL, then go back to Talk Digger once a day and check his evolution. Note: do not forget, a discussion is so beautiful with comments from everybody; then, comments and add you knowledge to it, it is always more than appreciated by all parties

Technorati: Talkdigger | network | discussion | bookmarklet | social | comments | find | search |

Talk Digger is 6 days old. I do not know how many requests I send to know if everything works fine after all modifications I have made on the system. Performing all theses searches give me the possibility to learn some things about these 9 search engines. There are some results I had.

The first thing that I noticed is that Google seems to have some difficulties with the link-back feature. The problem is that young or unpopular blogs/websites seem to be omitted by it. I think that the problem is the slow indexing of unpopular web pages that could cause the “problem”; the crawler just does not crawl them before weeks. It is the exact reason why pinging systems of new search engines is so interesting: it give you the possibility to get indexed in minutes, being popular or not. It is why system like King Ping are so important, it give the possibility to bloggers to instantly ping many search engine ping services. But it could be understandable that Google has not such a service, because Technorati does not have the same traffic than Google, for example.

A thing that is not understandable is when we compare Google with a search engine of the same size: MSN Search. How could we explain the fact that there are 3,931 link-backs tracked by MSN Search and 0 by Google for talkdigger.com after 6 days of activity? A bug with the results of MSN Search? A bug with the link-back feature of Google? A bug in both search engines? Who know…

Then we have the new emerging search engines, mostly blogging oriented. That time, the results will vary from a search engine to another. This is why Talk Digger is useful, some posts will be visible on all search engines, but will be indexed faster by some and slower by others. What is interesting is that many results are only visible on one or two search engines. Why? Two possibilities:

1. The blog/website owner just do not ping these search engines
2. The search engine just lost or omit to index the page

My first surprise came from Ice Rocket. Recently, many bloggers talked about it and wrote good words about the service. I am using that search engine since a week, and I need to say that their recently hard work in developing a good blog search engine give results. It is really reliable; the indexing is fast and the results accurate. This emerging search engine became a real player in the search engine industry. How have they reached that state? By listening at their users. This is the key to success folks: do what users want to use, and not what you, you want.

My second came from Technorati. During the first bombing in London, Technorati had many problems with their servers. Many thought that it was the beginning of the end for them. However, I have been really surprised by it during the last week. Their results were the first to arrive, far faster than the ones of Bloglines (except for yesterday and today that they seems to have some traffic problems). In fact, Bloglines seem to have some problem with their “citations” (link-backs) when come the time to search for heavy linked blog like the one of Robert Scoble. Bloglines also seems to have more results than other search engines, but I found that there were many duplicated entries.

What about Feedster? Many people also talked about it recently. They were questioning themselves about the validity of their results. Scott answered to these claims with that blog post. It seems that Feedster always found more results on low linked blogs/websites (except for some search, Bloglines have mores). It is probably a direct impact of the statistical algorithm they are using to estimate the number of entries in their database. However I need to add that sometimes, some entries only appear on Feedster.

Finally, what about BlogDigger? It does not seem bad, but the numbers of results are surprisingly low. It could be explained by the fact that people just do not ping them. However, even if they ping them, the indexing speed seem really low. It explains probably many things about that search engine.

I would like to say a last work about PubSub to clarify how Talk Digger calculate the number of results it returns. The results that appear in Talk Digger are the addition of the InLinks tracked by PubSub in the last 31 days that appears on their “Site Stats” section. It is the way that PubSub works, and it is why you will normally not have as many results compared with other search engines.

Technorati: soe | searchengine | talkdigger | google | msnsearch | pubsub | technorati | icerocket | blogdigger | blogpulse | bloglines | feedster |