There’s a lot of stats and analysis today about Twitter’s traffic, how it compares to other social search sites, and who’s benefiting from all the traffic Twitter can send. It seems no one argues that Twitter is on the rise, but just how high it’s risen is still up for debate.

Let’s start, appropriately, with a tweet: comScore posted a note that Twitter’s February traffic was up 55% over January. (We don’t see a formal release of this data yet, but will update when we do.) 55% is nothing to shake a stick at; it’s serious growth.

Steve Rubel dug into Twitter Search traffic (i.e., to search.twitter.com) today, and suggests that it’s about to surpass traffic to Google Blog Search:

Steve’s numbers come from Compete.com, which show Twitter Search getting 1.35 million visitors per month, slightly less than Google Blog Search’s 1.38 million. But other data services don’t show the same thing. Here’s how Quantcast — a service that some believe is generally more accurate — compares Twitter Search and Google Blog Search:

There’s no way to know which is correct without seeing actual data from Twitter and Google (don’t hold your breath…), so it’s anyone’s guess if Twitter Search is close to surpassing Google Blog Search. But from looking at the charts above, it doesn’t seem at all farfetched to think it will happen at some point in the future.

Meanwhile, Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins was also writing about Twitter today, but more specifically about where people go from Twitter.

Somewhat surprisingly (to me, at least) the Hitwise data shows Google as the largest recipient of Twitter traffic … and no, that doesn’t include traffic to YouTube (which I thought would be much higher than seventh):

Another thing worth mentioning is Heather’s comparison of traffic categories. She says Twitter’s clickstream doesn’t send as much traffic to shopping and educational sites (like Wikipedia) as search engines do. It sends more traffic to other social network sites and to personal blogs/web sites than search engines do.

In that sense, Twitter itself behaves just like you’d expect it to — like a social network. But the growth of Twitter Search, as evidenced by the charts and data above, suggests that Twitter is moving into a different realm, somewhere between social networking and search, and perhaps bringing together the best of both worlds. Social search, as Steve Rubel says in his piece today, “adds a much needed layer of trust to traditional search that helps us qualify sources.”

Blogging and micro-blogging represent a stream of real-time web activity; from important real-life events to random personal thoughts, more Internet users are putting what they see, hear, think, and feel into this stream. Twitter, in particular, is a river of information. Breaking news is often reported there first, ahead of any other media — online or not. Just last week, Danny Sullivan wondered why the major search engines don’t offer a search service that taps specifically into this stream of information.

Two other services are aiming to do just that, but Twitter itself could prevent real-time search on other platforms from having a chance of success.

Twingly offers what it believes is the first federated microblog search service: Twingly Microblog Search. The search engine includes Twitter, Jaiku (which Google is officially abandoning), Pownce (already shut down, but Twingly has six months of archives), Identi.ca, and several smaller microblog services from around the world.

Real-time search across multiple platforms sounds promising, but because Twitter is the 800-lb. gorilla in this space, a Twingly search will tend to look a lot like Twitter Search.

That’s not Twingly’s fault; it’s a reflection of Twitter’s dominance.

Meanwhile, does the name PubSub ring a bell? It launched years ago as a real-time RSS/Usenet/breaking news search tool, then shut down in 2007. ReadWriteWeb reports that PubSub is coming back and hopes to be a real-time blog search service.

ReadWriteWeb says PubSub, which is in a closed beta right now, should get updates “only seconds after a story” is published because it’s part of the Ping-o-Matic service. That puts it in competition with Google Blog Search, My Yahoo, Technorati, and other sites that get pinged when new blog posts go live. PubSub, the RWW article says, also accesses some Twitter feeds. But those updates are slower, presumably because PubSub doesn’t tap into the Twitter API.

The Twitter API allows external services to pull in what it calls a “Firehose” of activity on Twitter — all the posts as they happen, and more. Without using the API, it might be difficult, maybe impossible, for search engines to gather Twitter activity in a timely manner.

And there’s the fly in this soup: For all the effort to put value into real-time search — particularly where Twitter is concerned — Twitter itself may be putting an end to those efforts just as they’re getting started.

Jesse Stay, the founder of SocialToo, wrote yesterday that Twitter has announced new limits on its API that will take effect this week. Stay writes that will have a dramatic impact on the ability of other services to tap into the Twitter stream:

“… this is going to hurt every app out there. I’m arguing that 20,000, or any request-rate limit for that matter, limits any app out there from being able to develop on the Twitter platform, and I don’t see why any able-minded entrepreneur would want to build on it if there’s such a rate limit in place.”

If accessing the stream becomes more difficult, or limited, it may be that Twitter’s own search engine will become the only place real-time search has a chance to grow.

Gabe Rivera, has informed us that “automated news doesn’t quite work.” He explains that due to the issues Techmeme’s algorithms have with speed, grouping stories and primary source – Techmeme will be adding in a layer of human editing to the news aggregation.

Gabe explained that now a human editor will “explicitly” mix headlines on Techmeme, as opposed to implicitly changing the home page. Gabe said this will result in the news on Techmeme getting “faster and more interesting.” This will first be noticed on Techmeme.com, and then slowly be migrated over to the other meme properties they run.

When Techmeme opened in 2005, I’d found a new online newspaper to begin my day with. It quickly and neatly organized top stories as reported by various blogs and news sources for the area I cover. But if you weren’t into technology, you seemed kind of out of luck. Now Google Blog Search has stepped in to bring Techmeme-like organization for all subjects buzzing in the blogosphere. Below, a look at how it compares along with other resources such as Technorati and Blogrunner.

Major Search Engines & Blog Search

Google’s new service has only been out for less than a day, so I don’t want to go overboard with expectations. But blogs have largely been abandoned by the major search engines. Back in late 2004 and early 2005, there were huge expectations that the majors were going to do “something,” plus they dropped plenty of hints that blogs were indeed an area they were going to focus on.

Google finally kicked things off with Google Blog Search in September 2005. Yahoo followed in October, though blog listings were integrated into Yahoo News rather than be a standalone service. At some point, Microsoft allowed for searching of RSS feeds, and more was expected.

Since then, Yahoo’s “temporary” removal of blog search in mid-2006 has continued. Microsoft had feed search through the middle of last year, but it was dropped at some point after that. Google Blog Search continued on, but it remained keyword-based, search driven. That’s fine when you want to seek out news on a particular topic. But what if you want to discover what’s hot, the latest buzz, the latest “meme” that’s out there? That’s where you want memetrackers, as some call them.

I prefer to think of them as places that gives a newspaper-like front page summary of what’s happening. Google Blog Search — or Google Blogs, as you’ll see I think it should now be called — provides a new such front page. But let’s start in understanding it by looking at some of the others out there.

Technorati

Technorati is one such service. It has changed over the years to get away from being a search-driven site to providing a browsable interface. But the service has never taken off with me. I don’t find myself going there on a daily basis. In part, perhaps that’s because it has changed so much so often, I don’t know what to expect (last year, it changed in May, September and December 2007).

Looking at it again today, perhaps I should spend more time at Technorati. It groups many blogs into different categories. I can get a front page for technology or for the 2008 Election, for example. Both show me top “headlines” for those areas, plus headlines overall across the blogosphere are listed on the Technorati home page.

There are several things I dislike. For one, it’s all kind of “blah.” Stories all feel coequal, so I don’t really know what to take in first. There’s also a lot going on. Do I want the “Headlines” tab or the “Rising Posts and Stories” section?

I also don’t like that if you click on a headline item, such as an article about Apple dropping NDAs for iPhone developers, I don’t get to the article itself. Instead, I get a “reactions to story” page showing me what other blogs are saying about the story, plus — if I want — I can do another click to the story itself.

I do like that there’s a mix of blog content and news content. These go together often in the way that opinion pieces and news stories go together in a newspaper, though many blogs have news content as well. I can see On the left, “rising blog posts” and alongside on the right, “rising news stories.”

As I said, I just don’t spend much time at Technorati. I’ve gone back from time to time when there’s been breaking news in my area, to see what various blogs have been saying, and I tend to come away feeling dissatisfied. Maybe that will change going forward. But I also know that Search Engine Land is a top ranked blog in Technorati (currently 79 out of the top 100, and we’ve been as high as the 30s) yet we see hardly any traffic from the service. Given the authority we punch, I’d assume we’re showing up at the site in various ways. To not receive traffic indicates relatively few people are using the service. Certainly back at the end of 2006, we had reports that Google Blog Search had surpassed it in traffic.

Blogrunner

Blogrunner is another service that I’ve tried from time-to-time. Now owned by the New York Times, it operates similar to Techmeme in automatically looking for posts and grouping them by story subject.

Unlike Technorati, I do get impressed by what I find at Blogrunner whenever I head over there. In fact, when I remember to go, I sort of hit myself and think that I should be going there more.

Why don’t I? I suspect that if you’ve read Techmeme, then Blogrunner (at least its technology area, which is where I head) simply repeats the same stories but in a different layout. So it becomes redundant.

Like Technorati, you can use Blogrunner to drill into various categories, such as business or religion or even snowboarding (see the full list here). I like that if you click on a story, you go right to the story itself — not a “reaction” page as with Technorati. But if you want that type of reaction, you can select a “Full Coverage” link such as this and get a collection of related material.

Where Blogrunner has fallen down for me is that it doesn’t seem to consolidate items into a common “story cluster” as well at Technorati. For example, consider how the Technology page currently covers the relaunch of Google Blog Search:

Three different individual stories are listed covering the same topic. Now look at Techmeme:

There’s one topic — Google Blog Search’s relaunch — and all the stories are neatly organized in an easy-to-digest fashion. This is one of the things I love about Techmeme and which keeps me going back.

BuzzTracker

I completely forgot Buzztracker at first until I was doing some further searches for background on this article. So much for the strong support Yahoo’s giving it since buying the service back in September 2007. Like Blogrunner, you get blog posts organized into various categories. In fact, there are lots and lots of categories, such as Jeep news. There’s just no single “all topics” page I could find to point people at.

Overall, the site looks pretty clean and useful. But given you’d hardly know it was associated with Yahoo, I worry that they’ve forgotten they even own it. Still, one to watch.

Techmeme

As I said, Techmeme is where I start my day and where I return throughout it. I have other ways of finding stories in the tech space, but Techmeme remains the fastest and most digestible single source. We’ve covered much about the service, and here are a collection of stories with more information:

• Q&A With Gabe Rivera, Creator Of Techmeme

• You Can Search Techmeme

• Techmeme Launches Leaderboard

• Watch The Techmeme Home Page In Fast-Forward

And a few from my personal blog:

• Techmeme’s Front Pages: What’s Really A Big Story & How To Go Back In Time
• Techmeme & Fast Look At Other Meme Trackers

Techmeme does have a few Techmeme-like sites for other topics. Gossip hounds, see WeSmirch. Political junkies should Memeorandum. Baseball fans, check out Ballbug.

Google Blog Search

With the redesign, Google Blog Search should get a name change to Google Blogs. That’s because similar to Google News, you no longer have to search to see what’s going on with blogs. You can read from the home page and browse your way into stories.

Looking over the technology area, I was pleased that unlike with Blogrunner, there weren’t multiple story topics or clusters showing up. For the news about Google Blog Search itself, there was one single unit:

One thing I miss, however, is the ability to see what’s especially hot in the way that Techmeme displays things — a big item at the top, other items further down and so on. Of course, that’s pretty much how Google News operates. You get a list of items, one-by-one. But that might also be why I don’t spend that much time at Google News within the individual topical areas.

In contrast, one thing I love about Google News is how on the home page, I get a nice selection of stories from around the newsosphere:

But on Google Blog Search, there’s no selection of top stories divided into subjects. Hopefully, this will change.

Naturally, I want to know why a particular story gets to be the lead item for a topic plus what determines why a particular story topic comes first. For example, I can currently see on the technology page that a story cluster around Apple and iTunes is at the topic, with 57 blogs linking over 17 hours. But further below are topics that are more recent or with more blogs linking around them. Why don’t they come higher? And is it 57 blogs linking to the lead item? Or instead, 57 linking to the subject in general in some way (which seems to be the case).

The help page has some limited information:

Blog Search uses a set of algorithms to try to determine the most popular stories in the blogosphere. We consider factors such as a blog’s title and content, as well as its popularity throughout the rest of the blogging community. (Learn more about Google’s search technology.) Then we display groups of posts that are closely related. Because the process is entirely automated, we’re unable to make manual adjustments to the homepage.

One thing that concerns me about “content” being used is that blog search still does not, to my knowledge, spider pages. It only takes what you feed it. So if you feed it full-text, it has more content. Woohoo! Except that some people don’t put out full-text because of copyright concerns (like us here at Search Engine Land). Too many people interpret a full-text feed as permission to reprint your material without permission.

I raised this with Google way back when Google Blog Search launched and was told it was something they’d look at. I’ll check back with them again on it, plus about some of the other issues I’ve raised about how Blog Search operates, such as what determines which category a story goes into. Ideally, I want publishers to be able to submit a hidden full-text feed only to Google Blog Search, if they want.

Digg? Yahoo Buzz? Others?

What about other places out there, such as Digg or Yahoo Buzz? I haven’t mentioned them because though they’re good resources for buzz, that’s buzz as generated by readers rather than writers. I’m not saying one is better than the other — just different. If you want a sense of what everyone is writing about, Digg and Yahoo Buzz aren’t the places to go. If you want to know what people are talking about, they might better fit that bill.

In other resources, I hadn’t seen Blogs.com before. I spotted it through Marshall Kirkpatrick’s write-up on Google Blog search. At quick glance, it looks interesting.

Wither Techmeme

There’s a lot of chatter about whether Google Blogs is a Techmeme-killer. I doubt it. That’s like saying you’ve been reading People Magazine but now there’s this new thing called the New York Times that’s going to wipe out People. People is a specialty publication. The New York Times covers a broad range of topics. If you’re into celebrities, you’ll almost certainly stick with People.

Right now for many in the tech industry, Techmeme is our specialty magazine of choice, our Wired or Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. We’re going to keep reading it. But there are many people in other industries who need their own Techmemes for different topics.

I just saw a friend from my newspaper days who has to track political issues, including what’s on blogs. She turns to Slate for a rundown on what’s in the various papers plus blog recaps. I pointed out Memeorandum, as an additional resource, but what if she’d been interested in another area. Where would I point her for those topics?

I’ve talked to Gabe Rivera of Techmeme several times over the years about whether he’ll expand Techmeme into new areas. “Maybe” has been the general response. He’s a one-person show, happy with what he’s doing and with no particular ambition to take on everything. That’s been my impression, and I think he’ll continue to thrive.

Meanwhile, Google certainly provides a new option — plus Blogrunner deserves more attention, BuzzTracker is worth a look and Technorati remains out there.

Finally, a personal plea: can’t someone start a marketing news front page? Marketing is not tech, but tech areas often have the burden of carrying this because so much online marketing is mistakenly seen as a tech issue. At least I have our Sphinn site to see buzz in terms of what people are talking about in the online marketing world.

Blog search engine and news site Technorati has suffered various identity crises over the past couple of years as it seeks to fend off competition and angle toward an eventual acquisition. TechCrunch provides useful context and history for the latest re-imagining of the site as a hybrid blog and traditional news aggregator. With the latest version of the homepage and site, Technorati returns to a degree to its blog-search oriented roots. The site had morphed into a more mainstream news aggregator most recently before this redesign.

TechCrunch reports that new Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra said that the company had raised $21.6 million from funders to date. Technorati’s best bet is to be acquired by a media company seeking to add its technology to an existing news site, similar to what the New York Times has done with BlogRunner.

BuzzLogic started out offering analytics to identify the blogs that were having the greatest influence on particular topics or “conversations” online. Now the company is moving into the online advertising space. In a new product extension, BuzzLogic is enabling advertisers to target text or display ads on any blog within the Google AdSense network.

Marketers with existing AdWords accounts may create ads within BuzzLogic for the particular sites where the “conversation” about a product, service, or brand is happening. This capability doesn’t exist within AdWords/AdSense itself. BuzzLogic has said that other ad networks will follow in the near future.

What this means is that marketers can locate, create, and then place ads, say, for digital cameras, on blogs that have the greatest influence (as determined by the BuzzLogic algorithm) on the online discussion of digital cameras. This has many obvious and some less obvious but important implications for brands as well as direct marketers. As social media and blogs gain in influence, marketers are seeking ways to take advantage of or combat their influence. What’s interesting about BuzzLogic’s tools is that they make that influence much more transparent to marketers. And the new ad targeting options make it actionable.

Other blog search engines and tracking tools, such as Technorati, allow audiences and marketers to see blogs that may have overall influence or are discussing particular topics. But they don’t rank blogs for influence on particular topics or keywords, let alone allow marketers to buy ads on those specific sites.

BuzzLogic said its beta advertisers saw conversions that were as much as 2x better than other approaches.

The New York Times’ Blogrunner—A Techmeme Killer? from TechCrunch shows that the New York Times has added BlogRunner headlines on the Technology main page.

BlogRunner is very similar to Techmeme, where the system aggregates top news, and automatically tracks the discussion from around the web via linkage data. The New York Times explains this new feature is “frequently updated links to other sources reporting on technology, both blogs and traditional media publications, chosen by Times editors for their significance.”

Saul Hansell, NY Times editor, said this differs from Techmeme:

Unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren’t trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts.

Will BlogRunner displace Techmeme?

Ironically, there is a lot of coverage of this over at Techmeme, but very little to no coverage at BlogRunner.

Robert Scoble has posted about two interesting videos he did about reverse engineering Techmeme. The two videos are Part I and Part II, with the first being about 6 minutes long and the second being about 25 minutes long.

Robert explains how he feels Techmeme works and how you can possibly reverse engineer it to get to the top of Techmeme. In short, he explains how Gabe Rivera, who created Techmeme, uses importance ranking with linkage data and other factors to create his algorithmic based “blogroll.” For more on that, you can also read Danny’s Q&A With Gabe Rivera, Creator of Techmeme.

This is the week for top lists, it seems. First, we had the Techmeme Leaderboard get launched (and now being debated again), then we got a list of the most mentioned sites on Digg. Now there’s a third one — sites with the most cumulative Diggs. More on both Digg lists and the Techmeme debate, below.

Patrick Altoft over at BlogStorm did a Digg Saturation List this week. The idea was to see how often a site is mentioned on Digg. Patrick did a Google search focused within Digg itself for a variety of sites, then put them in order. YouTube topped the list, followed by Yahoo and Google.

It was interesting, but I commented that doing a search at Digg to see the number of times a site has had any stories actually submitted might be interesting — or more so, the number of overall Diggs a particular site has received for all of its stories.

Now we’ve got that, over at Yuivisense: StatBot: Top 100 Sites on Digg.com by Net Diggs. The blogspot.com domain tops the list with over one million cumulative Diggs, followed by Ars Technica, Yahoo and Engadget. Check it out.

As for the Techmeme Leaderboard, which launched this week, Dave Winer has stirred up debate by suggesting the leaderboard is further fueling people to say outrageous things just to get on the list and Techmeme itself.

I don’t know. Sure, Jason Calacanis getting up high today with his definition of Web 3.0 isn’t exactly my idea of top tech news. But this isn’t new, either. Techmeme’s Front Pages: What’s Really A Big Story & How To Go Back In Time from me back in June 2006 looked at how Rocketboom dominated Techmeme — which was a non-issue to me and commented on far beyond what I think many people thought was appropriate.

Sometimes, especially on slow news days, crazy things come up. Sometimes, you also get people with extra time on their hands to start reacting to something they might have shrugged off.

Yes, that can fire up an odd echo chamber effect on Techmeme. But sorry, Dave – Techmeme’s far from being a cesspool. Not perfect, sure — nothing is. But most of the time, I continue to find it my essential daily newspaper for the tech world, showing me throughout the day what various people are talking about.

FYI, Q&A With Gabe Rivera, Creator Of Techmeme from me earlier this year looks at the inner workings of Techmeme.

Technorati announced the addition of “Technorati Topics” to the home page and Technorati Topics landing pages.

These topics are a way for Technorati to create a simpler category system for blogs they index. Technorati Topics are presented on the home page and updated dynamically as new blog posts or stories are updated on these blogs. Only content from the “best blogs” are shown in the Technorati Topics. Some of the Technorati Topics include Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.

What are the criteria to be consider a “best blog” and be shown in the Technorati Topics pages? Dorion Carroll explains they use a combination of “Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.”

Here is a screen capture of the current topics on the home page, just so we have it for archiving purposes:

There is more discussion and coverage on Technorati Topics at Techmeme.