Interesting informal experiment in the Yahoo! Buzz Log:
Do you find blogs via links or through search? We wanted to know, so we lined up the top 20 blogs in the blogosphere according to Technorati … we did peek at the number of searches each received over the last week.
…
Turns out the lead blog on Technorati runs in the middle of the search pack. Fark ranked #5 on Technorati, but in terms of searches — it’s the top dog, er, blog.
Note that Yahoo! restricted its sample set to the top 20 blogs according to Technorati, so if all blogs were lined up according to search popularity on Yahoo, the top 20 might or might not include any of the Technorati top 20.
So, what’s this mean? It means that searches map to a different popularity ranking than links do. They’re two different measures. Technorati takes a sort of intra-blogosphere measurement of popularity, while Yahoo! is taking an external measurement of blog popularity, looking into the blogosphere from the web at large (or at least from search.yahoo.com). If you’re a marketer, you probably like Yahoo’s measurement better.
(via Steve Rubel)
