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Yesterday, Greg Gershman of Blogdigger announced that the company had been acquired by Odeo. He's joining as VP of Search and Engineering:
Basically, I'm doing what I did here, only I don't have to pay bills. ;)
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As for Blogdigger: don't worry, it's not going anywhere. Blogdigger will continue to operate as it always has, providing current, spam-free blog search results. You can still contact me with any questions, and we hope to be making some improvements to the Blogdigger services after we've got the new Odeo up and running.
Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb has more from Gershman:
[As] the blog search space grew more crowded, we tried a few different approaches to keep Blogdigger relevant. One was to expand into various other blog search applications, such as media search and local search. Media search really had the most traction, due to some of the search partnerships we had with sites like Webjay and Ourmedia.
(Read the whole thing.)
Stan Schroeder posts that Mashable will have Gershman on a podcast interview later this week.
Duncan Riley of TechCrunch gives some background on the acquiring company:
For the new Odeo (formerly SonicMountain) this is their second acquisition in just over 6 months, having acquired FireAnt in September.
Odeo posted a note to their blog:
Greg has been working with us as a consultant during the design and development phase of Odeo's new website and we are excited to have Blogdigger's technology powering Odeo's search and content aggregation engine.
So, what does this mean for blog search in general? Here's some Alexa data:
| # | Alexa | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Technorati | 254 | ||
| 2 | BlogPulse | 30,827 | ||
| 3 | Icerocket | 37,503 | ||
| 4 | Blogdigger | 49,933 |
Despite that people continue to be unsatisfied with Technorati, and have mixed views of Google Blogsearch, none of the alternatives have attracted a large audience. Conclusion: it's actually harder than it looks! I doubt this acquisition will help with blog search; the focus is clearly on audio and video. In any case, congrats to Greg Gershman.
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Thanks for the mention. I actually came across your site a while back (I think it was mentioned on TechCrunch) and meant to look more into it. Would like to learn more about it.
The focus of this acquisition is on the new Odeo; we hope to be able to improve Blogdigger, it does have revenues and traffic, but the technology was directly applicable to the new Odeo and that is what drove the acquisition.
I recently gave a talk at Network Solutions on "A History of Blog Search," which played back the past five years since the market was created, and went into a lot of what you mention: why Google dominates, how Technorati stayed on top and how the others are surviving.