PubSub's Wyman expects Google and Yahoo to plow into blog search

Posted by: Stephen Baker on July 11

Following all the teeth-gnashing about stodgy service at Technorati and other blog search engines, I caught up with PubSub founder Bob Wyman this p.m. Wyman says that blog search will be a relative snap for Yahoo and Google. “If you know how to build a search engine, there is no challenge,” he says, adding that they and Microsoft are probably waiting “to see who pulls the trigger first.”

His thinking? The first Internet giant to tackle blog search will suffer all the slings and arrows from the blog faithful—and will also get some things wrong. The second and third entrants, he says, will have a far easier time.

Wyman's company competes with Technorati, Feedster et al, but attacks the problem from the different direction: It searches new blog posts as they come in and matches them with its subscribers' queries. This is called prospective search. It's far different from the Google model, which receives queries and then hunts through a massive database to find matches. That's retrospective search, and it requires enormous computing and storage muscle.

Other Wyman quotes:

"We’re absolutely dead certain that not only Yahoo and Google, but also Microsoft, will do blog search. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for a startup (read Technorati) to invest in that technology. It’s probably a great learning experience. But you can’t build a sustainable business standing in front of Google."

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