Vertical engines have become major players in many sectors. In the last couple of years vertical engines taken on major rounds of funding. These engines often out preform the more traditional engines because they start with a curated list of sites. In this series we will look at some of the more popular vertical niche engines.
Blog Surf [
blogsurf.io...]
Blogsurf is a vertical search engine that indexes nothing but blogs.
Blogsurf's algo is called
MarketRank Points are calculated using Market Rank. They are a measure of the popularity of a post across online communities. Blog points are simply the sum of a blog’s post points.
MarketRank is built on the analogy of the market. An object with a higher market value is probably better.
It is interesting to note, that they claim that claim MarketRank is an "Anti-SEO Ranking Algorithm". However, if you read their post about it ( [
dkb.io...] ) , one quickly realizes that it is not anti-SEO, but rather Anti-Google. PageRank itself is the ultimate
popularity engine based on backlinks, citations, and other
popularity factors (E_A_T).
Google’s search result quality has declined to the point where many have noticed
Setting that aside, lets look at how well the blog search engine performs. It is difficult to compare it to other engines, because it is such a different model. Seaching for traditional keywords often brings up a wide array of disconnected results. For example, I am currently looking for
recipes with cheese and potatos.
That search brought back two results:
Potato Diet Community Trial
Tl;dr, we’re looking for people to volunteer to eat nothing but potatoes (and a small amount of oil & seasoning) for at least four weeks, and to share their data so we can do an analysis.
And the 2nd was for a paywalled site on SubStack.
So not-so-much with those results. So I go back to searching and realize there is one feature that I missed from Google: that is Instant as-you-type ajax generated results. In fact, I think this is the real charm of BlogSurf - the ability to surface discovery level content that you won't find anywhere else. I was not so successful just search for traditional keywords and questions, but using the instant search always seemed to surface content I didn't know was out there.
All-in-all, I give them credit for the effort and hope it continues to grow.
