More on IceRocket

Responding to my mild criticism of their search priority algorithm, Blake Rhodes from IceRocket sent this via email:

In response to your blog about our search results placement for blog search I will say that we place in order of date. We search content of blogs and place in order of most recent. So for example if you had an entire blog devoted to the NCAA basketball tournament but you had not written anything for a few days, you most likely would not be anywhere near the top. Hopefullly that explains it a little bit, feel free to email me anytime with questions or suggestions.

Fair enough. I wasn't really complaining, just noting the possibility for improvement. I still think that future iterations will probably benefit from being able to select sorting by popularity vs currency, perhaps as an option in the Preferences tab, but I am on the whole very pleased that they are doing this at all.

Note: the email was actually on Friday, but I didn't get around to reading it until today. Obviously this company is putting extra effort into responding to potential customers. Sandi got a similar email, when all she did was link to my post.

Update: Blake responds:

I agree 100% and this is something we are working on. For me personally I like the new, fresh stuff and that is what I hate about regualr web searches, the content and results changes very little and you see the same stuff over and over again. I like to know whats new and so do the other IceRocketeers, so thats where we started.

That being said, we do need an option based on relevacy AND date, but you then have to some up with a formula that ranks certain blogs as more important. We are getting there, believe me...