Topix and Blekko Search
May 17, 2011
I noticed a change in the Topix.com search system over the weekend. Results come from Blekko.com. As you may know, Blekko.com is a good option to have in hand when the results from Google or Bing miss the mark. For some of my queries, I use Blekko.com before I wade through the Google result lists.
In my tests of the new search system, I did notice one somewhat annoying characteristic. To see what created extra work for me, navigate to www.topix.com. You will see a page of “Recent US News News & Discussions.” Ignore the “News News” weirdness and look at the search box. Enter a query for a popular topic. I tried “sharepoint” and “dancing with the starts.”.
Notice that the search results appear with a site limiter command; specifically, site:topix.com shown in the screenshot below:
The implementation is a hosted service much like the Blossom.com search solution I use for the Beyond Search blog. The problem is that the index is stale. In the “sharepoint” query, I got a hit to Houston Newswire but the story was no longer available: http://www.topix.com/wire/houston/p5.
What’s happening is that the new content in Topix is not being indexed quickly by Blekko. Now what I mean by quickly is that I need to be able to locate news stories with my query terms over the last two or three days. I also need to locate today’s stories. Topix is a “news news” site, and I need the search system to refresh its index quickly.
What’s the fix? Easy, copy the query string from the Blekko Topix results page, in my case, site:topix.com sharepoint and navigate to Google.com. Then paste the query string into the Google search box and you get more current hits on the topic in which you are interested.
Can Blekko speed up its indexing cycle? Sure, and I think the company will. Google and other search systems create priority lists for content acquisition. Blekko needs a similar high priority operation to make Topix search useful to those who look for “news news”, to use Topix’ own weird lingo.
How much faster is the Google cycle? On my spot tests, Google was lagging by hours. Blekko was lagging by days but even more disturbing was the Blekko Topix results did not present content. I was getting for my sharepoint query a list of jobs shown below.
This is a really bad relevance issue, which when combined with the index staleness, is causing me to use Google.com to search Topix.
Hopefully this issue will be remediated soon.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2011
Freebie
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[…] Topix and Blekko Search Beyond Search: I noticed a change in the Topix.com search system over the weekend. Results come from Blekko.com. As you may know, Blekko.com is a good option to have in hand when the results from Google or Bing miss the mark. For some of my queries, I use Blekko.com before I wade through the Google result lists. […]