Thanks Dave! When I have some time (which will probably be after Bryght is out of beta), I will do a PubSub versus Feedster versus Technorati showdown for both a simple 1 keyword search and for an advanced multi-word boolean search as well as check out Technorati watchlists again. And I agree with Richard, please stop using variations of the pharse "let a hundred flowers bloom"; how about something like 'Vive la competiton' instead!

From Roland Tanglao asks some good questions about watchlists - Sifry's Alerts.:

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Here's my response, which is slightly edited from the comment I left on Roland's weblog:

...

First, When you do a search using Technorati, you'll get every post since the beginning of time (well, actually about 2 years ago onwards), not just the results from the moment you created the watchlist. I like PubSub, but they don't give any indication of what happened before you create your search. Also, I think you'll find that Technorati's results have the fastest updates.

Second, not all people who have RSS feeds have full-text feeds. Technorati actually indexes the full content of a post, not just the partial text that is often in the RSS feed.

Third, have you tried comparing results from advanced searches (using booleans and the like) when using Technorati watchlists compared to others? An advanced search is something like a search that allows you to group or use phrases, for example, like:

tsunami AND (phuket OR thailand OR "sri lanka") or
("six apart" OR sixapart) AND (livejournal OR "live journal") and so on.

In our testing, we've found that our advanced searches are more accurate and timely.

We also provide links to the cosmos of each post in the watchlist, as well as the relative authority of each blog, so you can get a quick indication of how authoritative or influential the blogger is. I personally find this quite useful.

Technorati is also indexing over 5.5 million blogs (and growing by over 20,000 per day!), both blogs with RSS feeds, and those without RSS, which is orders of magnitude more than some other services that only track RSS feeds.

We also have cosmos watchlists, which let you quickly and easily track who is linking to your blog or any URL you care about - your company, your blog, an interesting article, whatever.

And the limit to 3 watchlists is actually old cruft on our site - you actually can subscribe to as many watchlists as you like. Expect that text to go away shortly.

And of course, your criticism that Technorati should have had this long ago is quite accurate - we've been growing like crazy, and building out all the features we've wanted to build out has taken time. We also had some scaling and response time issues in the past, and we really wanted to make sure that we nailed the most critical issues with the service first. Note that we still have bugs (e.g. we are still seeing some link count glitches), and we're still going to continue to fix them at the same time we're rolling out new and useful features for our users. And there's lots more to come.

So please, continue to use the fine services from Feedster and PubSub! And please continue to try out and use Technorati watchlists as well. May a thousand flowers bloom.

UNQUOTE

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