Using Blog Search for Business

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I first got involved with Icerocket.com because the way I searched for data wasn’t and isn’t supported by Google, Yahoo or the other traditional search engines.

In a traditional search engine, most people look for information on topics that are new to them. They want to find out information for the first time on a new product or service. Maybe they want to find out about a person, place or thing. Maybe they want to hunt down pictures on celebs. Whatever.

Searching for items that are for your personal information is a far different process than searching for information that will help you in business.

In business, you usually already know something about the people, places, things, companies, services, whatever you want more information on. Not only do you usually know something about them, but you are more interested in the latest information, rather than the “most relevant” information.

The best example of this is searching for information about your own company’s products, employees or the company itself. If you are in corporate management at McDonalds, doing a search that liststhe McDonalds website first, and McDonalds corporate or related websites 8 of the next 10, isnt going to be of much help. Worse yet, the sites listed are rarely going to change, and with more than 2mm sites referencing McDonalds, the chances of the company really getting an understanding about what is being said about it online is slim.

I like to do what I call my “daily searches”. I search for references to the Mavs, to HDNet , to Icerocket, to any of the films we are releasing or are in theaters and more. I want to know what is being said online about the businesses I am heavily invested in. IfI know what is going on in the web, I can track any issues, andwhere necessary, respond.

It used to be an old customer service mantra, that “One upset customer can tell 20 people about how poorly your company performed, and those 20 people could tell 20 more and your business could really suffer. Keep all your customers happy, and you won’t have to worry”. Those numbers are miniscule compared to today.

In today’s world, one upset customer can write in their blog about how upset they are about your product or service and it could be linked to by any number of other blogs, which in turn are linked to by any number of blogs, which is in turn picked up by a tv news show. In 24 hours or less, tens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have heard the complaintand your business and brand are at risk.

In my business life “freshness” of information from a search is far, far more important to me than relevancy. I want to know what is being said, and the sooner the better.

This was, is and will continue to be the focus of Blogs.icerocket.com (it will be renamed http://www.blogscour.com, but we arent sure when).

Using the McDonalds example again, a blogs.icerocket.com search comes back with a completely different response. It’s still a lengthy list, but with our engine, we can limit the responses to today, this week, this month or some custom combination of dates. Of course we also then give you the option of bookmarking the search, by using our search history page or subscribing to it and having it delivered to MyYahoo, MSN, or any RSS reader.

Of course, it’s even better when you search for a specific product. I happen to like the McDonalds California Cobb Salad. (Stupid Trivia…When i travel on my plane or on the Mavs plane, it’s 2 Cobb Salads and salsa dressing for me.) A Search for the Cobb Salad finds an interesting blog from a customer who took the time to write about the quality of the service she received.

The value of being able to find this kind of information in almost realtime is priceless. The abillity to track an unlimited number of searches by having it show up in my reader on any deviceI have with me makes my life a lot easier and my job a little simpler.

Being able to respond quickly to an upset customer is the easiest way to lock in a customer for life.

Of course beyond business applications, there are great research and personal use applications.

It’s a great way to find personal restaurant and movie reviews. It’s a great way to do research on current news or political topics and to find out the latest gossip where timeliness is much more important than the relevancy of how many people linked in to it that you find on Google and others.

This isn’t to say that blogs.icerocket.com is a finished product. It’s not. There is much room for improvement. Let me know what you think of it and what ideas and suggestions you may have.

50 thoughts on “Using Blog Search for Business”

  1. ремонт квартир натяжные потолки

    Comment by натяжные потолки -

  2. Mark,

    I really like the fact that IceRocket has a greater focus on blogs. I think this is one of the only traditional search engines which puts an emphasis on blogs. This is great. Thanks for being original and changing the game! I use IceRocket faithfully.

    Comment by Free Blogs -

  3. mark, buy the pirates!!! make the nuttings an offer they can’t refuse!!!

    Comment by paul maggio -

  4. Thanks for the pointer to IceRocket. Since you asked for feedback, let me say I just tried IceRocket — quite like it results-wise but it seems to be very slow. This doesn’t seem to be related to my connection speed (I’m on a broadband connection). The search I did was labelled as completed in 9+ seconds and it took far longer for the results page to actually download. Is this because the site is still in its early stages of development or it just one of those inexplicable anomalies?

    Comment by Murli -

  5. A nice idea, but how do you deal with web developers fudging dates?

    To be honest, I don’t use icerockets much because quite frankly I can’t remember the name. It seems like it would appeal to a very specific crowd.

    Comment by Hercule.Poirot -

  6. Thats very interesting, didn’t know I could do all that with icerocket.

    Comment by Alex -

  7. the one thing i don’t like about the icerocket blog search is that it isn’t *really* a blog search. it’s an rss search. when i search for, for example, dirk nowitzki, you get a bunch of newspaper articles, a few spam/advertising pages that sneaked their way in, and maybe a few blog posts about him. i don’t mind a newspaper search but that should already be covered under news.

    when i do blog searches, not just on your engine but all of them, i want opinions of normal people. not professionals who are righting for pay. i want to know what fans or consumers (depending on the search) are thinking. i’m not sure how this problem could be resolved but it’s one that i think exists for all blog search engines.

    Comment by Matthew -

  8. search quality is paramount. as the time sensitive search market opens, it will be won or lost on search quality. (as you say, the info is priceless) i don’t care if it takes a second or two to come back with results because that can be fixed by throwing more hardware at the problem. quality results are what make google great in the relevance search market. i think icerocket has some way to go here because the search spammers have the advantage of already being honed by google.

    Comment by Anders Brownworth -

  9. mark, i just wanted to see if you had seen the icerocket search results for “mark cuban”? the first entry at the moment (7/26 1:00 pm) is suspect 🙂

    Comment by ben -

  10. hey mark great tool, but you want to know an idea that would make it even better?? firefox engine.

    i love firefox engins and use them constantly, i think they are the coolest thing. anyways you asked for feedback so there’s mine. you could also make a toolbar for internet explorer, but let’s face it, ie is just lame. (boo microsoft)

    peace,
    stephen

    Comment by Stephen Stull -

  11. blogs.icerocket.com is long overdue approach to a problem businesses don’t even know they have yet. there was a company a few years ago, netcurrents.com, that came up with a way to monitor online sentiment and rank it from green to red, i.e,. positive to negative. it was an idea ahead of it’s time. they were eventually acquired by kroll who is doing who knows what with it by now. thanks, mark, for icerocket and for speaking at ao2005 last week.

    Comment by Tony Brice -

  12. Wow, Icerocket is a nice variation. I never knew about it but I do now. Thanks Mark!

    Lew

    Comment by Lew Patton -

  13. Alright here’s my two cents. My biggest irritation with search engines is that they search for similar words, not similar phrases. I’ve often done searches with three topic words or more on the line. Yes, the search does start off with what I originally typed in that may get two or three hits. After the first twelve finds, the search engine starts listing finds by single topic words not the entire phrase of words I typed in. I have NEVER found the ‘singling out by word’ to yield useful info on a particular topic. In fact, it makes me waste even more time sifting through it. Why not limit the ability of the search to specifically those words grouped I typed on the Search Line? Would save us all a hell’va lot of time.

    Comment by mycquester -

  14. Very good idea. I tried it out and found some interesting information. Do you think Google will implement some sort of blog-only search function? Maybe type in “blog:query”?

    Thanks for your ideas.

    Comment by Josh -

  15. Great idea w/ icerocket.com.

    My only question is, how will you prevent companies like Google and YHOO from copying your idea (search by date features), if this turns out to be a big hit? Will you try to patent this “feature” like AMZN’s one click check out?

    Comment by Billy L. -

  16. Your spot on Mark. I like the openess of icerocket. As a tools/service provider to orgs, using icerocket with open tags as opposed to closed, technorati, is a big plus.

    Thanks,

    jim wilde
    http://www.advancinginsights.com

    Comment by jim wilde -

  17. The IceRocket tool is pretty cool. I searched for my company, ActivSoftware, and found some things from people that I was not aware were posted. All good of course.
    ———————————–
    Email Application Server: http://www.activsoftware.com/xms/

    Comment by Rob Thrasher -

  18. I have the feeling you’ve been watching this already, but here is a reminder that the blogmeister Robert Scoble has been testing the effectiveness of blog search engines (http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/). I recommend keeping an eye on his findings.

    Comment by Walter Lounsbery -

  19. This is a pretty cool tool for keeping an eye on brand management in the blogosphere. Thanks for the heads-up.

    Comment by Preston Wily -

  20. Looks great. Not just for business of course. I like it for “memes”, little words you invent to see how they spread. I searched for “cyberthalamus” and didn’t find it yet. It’s mainly active on kuro5hin.org, a very nice community/blog.

    Comment by Ryan Keppel -

  21. I read about blogscour earlier this weekend. If it can do what it claims it will do, it’s a God-send.

    Nothing like REAL real-time news for us “10,000 hats” entrepreneurs.

    Comment by Charles -

  22. Mark,
    I think you have a great idea as far as the blog searching goes and also with business alike. I am sure that I don’t have to tell you that considering you’re already a major success in business. I have to agree with you on freshness most likely has an edge on relevance. Keep coming up with the ingenious ideas and someday I may surpass your financial success!!!

    Comment by Champ -

  23. Mark,

    I just used icerocket for the first time and while I think your on to something I see some issues.

    Try a search for icerocket, 7 of the first 10 results I get are from “technoo gle.com”, not due to content but due to the following text “Technorati&IceRocket Tags:”

    One of the worst things about search engines today is the lack of relevant information and the freshness of it. You are track with date filtering, but irrelevant listings like those I found are another huge issue.

    I it might be better to consolidate the information from any given domain to a link that offers “more listings from this domain” in a hover=display listings mode or something of the like.

    Search engine optimizers are already onto the add a blog listing for page rank scam, which is the beginning of the credibility issue. Maybe the answer is in the “other listings from this domain” results? This way a user can see what type of information is within the site and how often it’s used.

    Blogs, while easy to pick up the rss, contain only part of the picture. User forums might have an untapped wealth of information that is php driven thus easily crawled.

    On a previous note DVD or HD.

    It will be HD, not due to portability, but due to connectability…bandwidth is the answer 😉 Look into the test they are running using the electrical grid to transfer the 0’s and 1’s

    http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=broadband+over+powerlines

    Goolge is putting their money on it are you?

    B;-)ing,

    B

    Comment by Mrbshouse -

  24. Danny-

    This option will be added this week.

    blake

    Comment by Blake -

  25. I wish IceRocket let you sort Blog search results by the popularity of the blog (or of the particular page).

    Comment by Danny Taggart -

  26. very, very, useful. i’m addicted to using this blog search!

    i’m emailing all my friends about it, and everyone else should as well.

    I checked all the blogs about the rumors of Mark buying the Pirates: http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=%22mark+cuban%22+pirates

    Great stuff.

    Comment by Jeff Atkins -

  27. I have been using the Icerocket blog search for a few months and it’s a great way to tell how popular something is.

    If you read the newspapers you will always get the same opinions, bloggers don’t lie. Doing a blog search on Icerocket will produce the most honest results/opinions you can find.

    There is no sugarcoating from bloggers, if something sucks they will let you know and if something is great they will endorse it.

    Comment by Jacob -

  28. Perfect way to keep up with all the trade rumors in the NBA and MLB. Great tool. Very fast search.

    Thanks Mark for making something so useful.

    Comment by James -

  29. Absolutely amazing. Icerocket blog search rocks!

    Comment by Stan -

  30. I really like icerocket’s search results especially the blog search feature as it picks up things that don’t show up in technorati and are hard to find with google. What will happen to icerocket when blogscour is launched? I was never much of a fan of the icerocket name or branding, a total re-branding of the service with the launch of blogscour would be a good thing.
    Search history is a really good feature of google, but I would prefer if I was also able see whats new since the last time I searched. RSS is fine but I want it all in my unified search environment not in my news/blog reader.

    PS. Please no sponge in the blogscour logo! 🙂

    Comment by Conann -

  31. Technorati already does this, and has been for a while now. According to Steve Rubel, Yahoo will introduce a blog search. So what makes IceRocket’s crawler/algorithms better than the leading brands?

    Comment by Kunal Anand -

  32. The date range option is very useful, but why not an option to list the results in chronological order, with most recent posting being at the top?

    Comment by Tino Buntic -

  33. Hi Mark,
    How about a search option where one can look for information on similar businesses/companies/concepts/ideas/keywords ?

    Bcas each page on the web is indexed with different key words, a user has to guess so many keywords and search in blogs and websites to find all the relevant information on a topic.

    Comment by Rajan K -

  34. Mark,

    The HREF to http://Blogs.icerocket.com/ (clickable here) is blank in your tenth paragraph so it’s not clickable …

    Cool stuff … but why the delay in renaming the site – seems strange – don’t you want to build the brand identity from day 1?

    Comment by alek -

  35. Wow, thanks for enlightening me. I had no idea icerocket was that useful. I always thought it was a cheap knockoff of google. But they really are very different kinds of information. I’ll definitely be using that more often now!

    Comment by Andrew Olson -

  36. Mark,

    You are absolutely correct, for once, with this post.

    I, too, feel like you’ve got a name that leaves a bit to be desired, but maybe it will grow on people.

    I’m hoping you were using scour ( why you’re using it, I don’t know ) as the verb that a thesaurus would connect with beat, comb, ferret out, find, fine-tooth-comb, forage, grub, hunt, inquire, look for, rake, ransack, rout, rummage, seek, track down, turn upside-down.

    I just did a search for a name with blog in it and I see why you got scour, it was the only word left in the English language.

    How about a post about the vampires that buy names just to hold and resell them ?

    How about a law that says if you get a domain name and don’t use it within 3 months you get a public flogging and forfeit your right to ever buy another ?

    Comment by Mike Sigers -

  37. Whether its blogging, directories, forums etc. the one thing everyone seems to be circling around in the big “search” factor, but i still dont see where a business can benefit from exposure in a blog, as much as a “business directory” would. Theres no company details within the blog, no colour ads, no telephone number, etc. etc.

    Comment by Thailand Business Directory -

  38. Whether its blogging, directories, forums etc. the one thing everyone seems to be circling around in the big “search” factor, but i still dont see where a business can benefit from exposure in a blog, as much as a “business directory” would. Theres no company details within the blog, no colour ads, no telephone number, etc. etc.

    Comment by Thailand Business Directory -

  39. I was never much of a fan of the icerocket name or branding, a total re-branding of the service with the launch of blogscour would be a good thing.

    Comment by runescape money -

  40. If you read the newspapers you will always get the same opinions, bloggers don’t lie. Doing a blog search on Icerocket will produce the most honest results/opinions you can find.

    Comment by wow powerleveling -

  41. I looked at that site and it’s very interesting. Yes, Technorati has been doing this for a while now but overall, all this business blogging is amazing. Today I found a site that actually lists all the Corporate Blogs including our fast food chains and Airline companies.

    Comment by BizMord Marketing Blog -

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  50. Your search engine just saved me a lot of time doing research for my company. This is invaluable for competitor analysis and doing some effective(cheap) market research. How is your model going to incorporate paid advertising? Also, what do you think the future is of videoblogs? Thanks for all the creative ideas and solutions that inspire new entrepreneurs.

    Comment by Ryan -

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