Topix.net Adds 15,000 Blogs

Posted on November 6, 2005

Search Engine Watch (SEW) reports that Topix.net has added 15,000 weblogs to its news search engine. According to SEW the blog posts will be mixed in with the news articles. A post on the Topix.net weblogs also discusses the new blog addition. The post discusses how they came up with the 15,000 weblogs. Topix.net says 85-90% of blogs pinging Weblogs.com and the other ping services are spam and half of the non-spam blogs aren't frequently updated.

There've been reports that there are 20 million weblogs, even one report said there were over 100 million. This is one of those cases where statistics can be very misleading. While the total number of unique feeds that have ever existed, or blogging accounts that have ever been signed up can certainly be counted, what is far more relevant to us is the composition of the daily posting stream. What we're seeing is that 85-90% of the daily posts hitting ping services such as weblogs.com are spam (take a look for yourself). Of well-ranked non-spam blogs that we've discovered, we've found about half haven't been updated in the past 60 days. Our filters sift through what's left, which even after discarding 95%, is still a great deal of good material.

For now Topix.net says it is highlighting the blog posts so people can tell the difference.

Blogs and news are now on equal footing on Topix.net. We're visually highlighting blog posts on our pages for the moment so you can tell the new material from the main stream media posts, but consider the the current display a beta, in all likelihood this won't be the final UI.

Topix.net's addition of blogs follows on Yahoo's recent inclusion of blogs in its news search engine. Google added a blog search but so far has not included many blogs in its Google News service.