Reporting on a Blogspotting interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher, Mark Evans thinks that the blog search market is “ripe for Google to steal the business”:

Fletcher’s hitting exactly on what I’ve been harping on for months that there has to be a better mousetrap for blog search. Despite all the attention it receives, Technorati – with all due respect – is being overwhelmed by its willingness to post everything and anything. Someone really smart is going to come up with an algorith/methodology that combines a blog’s traffic, relevancy and high ratings to product superior and effective blog search results.

I disagree.

One of the greatest features of Technorati is that it shows what everyone is saying right now (ignoring their growing pains). Why should my search results or the tag page only show content from the so-called A-Listers (that’s what you’re getting at with traffic, “ratings”, and to a lesser extent “relevancy”)? Their content should not be given priority over anyone elses. It’s not like PubSub only watches the A-List feeds, nor does Weblogs.com only show when the A-Listers have updated their blogs.

I’ve talked about the definiton of blogs before (via Jeff Jarvis): Blogs are the voices of citizens in conversation.

Why should the conversation be limited to or enhanced for a select few? The so-called A-Listers already have problems with including everyone else, we don’t need a search engine to make things worse.

Perhaps what’s required is not better search results, but better ways of viewing and interacting with those results so that they are more meaningful and can be processed more efficiently.

Read: Mark Evans