

Show HN: a blog search engine - chris_l
http://sotosearch.com/

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micheljansen
Nice! As much as I like the minimalistic approach, I feel this need a bit more
explanation. What does "blog search" mean? Does it search for blogs or within
blogs? What is the definition of a blog? Which blogs does it search? How does
it determine whether something is a blog or not (my blog does not seem to be
included) Why would I want to specifically search blogs and not just use
Google? These questions matter and should be explained by the product itself
:)

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chris_l
Thanks for the feedback. To answer some of your questions, soto searches
within blogs, using the existence of syndication feeds as the criterion. We
are currently still growing the base of blogs so naturally not all are
included. I'll make sure to add some documentation.

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sfard
Nice. Though, I agree with others that an explanation would kind of be
helpful. Also since you're going with the minimalist approach, maybe make
everything a bit bigger?

Are you just searching within a subset of domains? If so, may I shamelessly
recommend adding <http://throwww.com> to the list?

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solarflair
What advantages does Soto Search offer over Google Blogsearch
(<http://www.google.com/blogsearch>) or Icerocket
(<http://www.icerocket.com/>)?

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Gormo
Or, for that matter, Technorati (<http://www.technorati.com>), which I'm
surprised hasn't been mentioned so far in this thread.

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tannerc
Nice start! It's great to see small initiatives like this grow.

Question: how are results being ranked? I did a search for "creativity" and
got a slew of outdated (~22 days) results. Not quite what I was expecting.

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chris_l
The "best match" ranking does not take time into account, but if you choose
"newest first" that is the main criterion.

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hotdox
some critics:
[http://sotosearch.com/search?query=android&ordering=best](http://sotosearch.com/search?query=android&ordering=best)
\- results page is a mess of many languages, it would be better to detect
language of page and user (by browser language) and use it for ranking

~~~
chris_l
ok, that results page really is messy. The crawler does actually do language
detection, but it isn't perfect. Soto currently only offers search in English
actually.

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onlyup
Honestly, the results are terrible.

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brador
Use cases?

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orangethirty
Stack?

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dakimov
Did not work for me at all. Just keeps showing the spinning search indicator.
I suspect Google Blog Search is about 1e+6 times more elaborate, so hardly
there are any perspectives. Kudos for doing something anyway.

