Live Seach vs Web Search

Comparing Bloglines to Google, searching the bailout bill and Scientology with Phil Nelson, Sean Campbel, and Hunter Olson (by Sarah Olinger)

The blog search engine Bloglines gives us biased results, that are personal and give us a glimpse into the basic feel and opinion of the public, whereas the web search (we used Google) simply pulls up all news sources.  Interestingly, there is a link at the bottom of the google results that we can click to view the results of our inquiry in blogs also.

The live web search on bloglines pulls up blogs that are extremely current, showing us blogs posted within the last five minutes.

Depending on what we were looking for in the search, the group mainly decided Google was the best bet for current events, simply because of credibility.  We also pointed out that the news sources would all have the same general facts, so gain additional insight we would peruse the blog searches.

Next we used bloglines and google to search about Scientology.   Blog posts aren’t as frequent as the current events, but “not current” in this case means the newest post was up a mere 16 minutes ago.  The posts are hard to categorize, many of them not specific to Scientology, but simply including the concept in the post.  The only category we could generally come up with was “rants on Scientology.”  The Google search results are less current and definitely not news, but they are significantly more focused on the subject of Scientology.  While it is interesting to see what peoples opinions and thoughts are on Scientology from Bloglines, we ultimately chose Google again as your primary search choice.  This gives us a more focused result pool, while still providing an array of articles and viewpoints.

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