It was just a matter of time, but Bloglines has launched its own blog search engine, with feeds for search results. This could be significant; nobody has been able to knock Technorati off its perch yet, but Bloglines comes equipped with a pretty big user base. And for those of us who use feeds for blog monitoring, the ability to subscribe to search results with a single click is potentially very compelling.
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Now if they could just fix their broken Atom feed handling… you know, pay attention to the core of their service. I say this as a Bloglines user who’s getting impatient about seeing valid feeds improperly rendered. (Trouble is that the other web-based readers suck more: Newsgator is really slow, and Rojo’s interface is evil… and slow. A desktop aggregator is not on as long as I’m using a half-dozen computers on three OSes each week.)
I don’t know what to make of this search feature yet; it seems to track fewer blogs than Technorati or Google. That may prove to be a Good Thing (avoiding spam and echo-chamber posts), though most of the time when I do a blog search, it’s the equivalent of sticking my finger in the wind to see what people (well, the subset that maintain blogs) are saying about something-or-other. For that purpose, erring on the side of inclusion is good. (The one-click sub thing isn’t all that compelling if you’ve got the bloglines toolkit extension for Firefox.)
True about the one-click thing — although on an iBook, not having to right-click is a blessing. :)
I suspect Bloglines relies less on spidering than Technorati and Google do to discover new feeds; instead, they can just draw on the feeds their users have subscribed to.