Greg Gershman has built a cool application of Google Earth. You can jump from Blogdigger Local search results to Google Earth and see markers for all of the blogs in your geo neighborhood. The result looks something like this:

(That’s Greg’s image. Don’t have Google Earth running here, waiting for the OS X version. Impatiently.) Blogdigger seems to have found its niche with Blogdigger Local, and it’s a good one.

Interesting article in Sunday’s NYT about a Lawrence, Kansas paper including user-generated content in a big way:

“I don’t think of us as being in the newspaper business,” said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper’s parent. “Information is our business and we’re trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible.”
…
“We believe that journalism has been a monologue for so long and now is the perfect time for it to become a dialogue with our readers,” said Rob Curley, 34, the World Company’s director of new media. “We want readers to think of this as their paper, not our paper.”

Danny Sullivan is skeptical about the accuracy of Google’s and Yahoo’s results counts, used by Tristan Louis in two studies, which concluded that Yahoo has better coverage of blogs than Google, which in turn has better coverage than Technorati. Danny posted an email conversation with Tristan about his study. It’s a little hard to follow the lines of argument, but it’s well worth reading because it illuminates the difficulties in getting a handle on index size, and especially blog coverage, by the search giants.

Danny, from his exchange with Tristan:

Also, Google did say “of about” with the numbers it reports. That’s not an accident. They’re saying that this is an estimate. But no disagreement with me. If you put up a count, it would be nice if the count was as accurate as possible. Google’s have come under question.

Hmm. From what I’ve seen in Tristan’s data and my own testing, it’s Yahoo’s counts that ought to come under question, specifically for link: queries.

Danny to Tristan again:

The link: command is completely different than the site: command. The link command tells you nothing about the size of the index. As for a confirmation that all links aren’t reported, this past blog post from SEW gives you confirmation and this page on Google mentions links are only a sampling of what Google knows although this other Google page fails to make this clear.

link: and site: are very different, that’s true enough. And maybe the link command doesn’t tell you much about the size of an index, but if link collection methods are similar between Yahoo and Google (and why wouldn’t they be, it’s a relatively easy part of the whole game), then the counts ought to be similar. But they’re not, not by a long shot.

By the way, a big thanks to Tristan for posting his studies and kicking off this discussion. Most of us don’t take the time to do analysis of that depth to support our opinions, and to post the entire method and dataset so others can reproduce it, shoot holes in it, go off on tangents from it.

(I stumbled onto Danny’s post via John Battelle)

Dave Sifry is chiming in on some analysis done by Tristan Louis about how well Google, Yahoo and Technorati are covering the blogosphere. Briefly, here’s what Tristan did: He ran link: queries on Google, Yahoo and Technorati for the blogs in the Technorati Top 100 and recorded the number of results reported by each search engine. For example, taking BoingBoing, the 1st blog on that list:
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Great column on the state of search by James Fallows in today’s New York Times (online version here), entitled “Enough Keyword Searches, Just Answer My Question”. Fallows doesn’t mince words.
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The new Technorati is beautiful. The UI is beautifully conceived and lavishly rendered, and completes the integration of tags and photos with search that Technorati has been working on for some time. It strikes me as the first of its generation of blog search engines that has fully grown up to be what it wants to be, and the UI implementation is head and shoulders above its peers. And yet, when you use it, you have the feeling of opening the door to an overstuffed closet. There’s a lot of stuff that comes tumbling at you.

The presentation reflects some real qualities of the blogosphere: In aggregate, the blogosphere is noisy, diverse, urgent, in-your-face, gah! Technorati gets across the busy-ness of the blogosphere of the last few hours, where bloggers continuously decant their paragraphs and photographs into the teeming “world live web”, as Technorati used to call it. Is this the best way to do blog search? Should blog search be a megaphone or an earphone? Should it be an amplifier, a repeater, a filter, or a tuner? Some of each? Something else entirely? A purple frog?

Peter Caputa has a concise roundup of blog search news from this week.

Henk van Ess makes a dramatic show of scooping a story about a Google “Secret Lab”, which consists of an army of students worldwide that rate Google search results and new features using an eval UI. Ho-hum. I’m not steeped enough in Googlemania to know whether this is some kind of scandal, e.g. whether Google has claimed that it doesn’t use human raters or whatever. Every search company needs something like this, appropriately scaled for its content and audience, of course.

This flash movie shows some screenshots of what’s purported to be the Google eval UI. More or less what you’d expect, but not as nice as some others I’ve seen …