Vanilla search still rules?

A breaking story hits showbiz. But you want more than just the wire report, you want reaction. And you want reaction from the self-annointed punditry online, a.k.a. the webloggers. You really don't want to sift through the seemingly millions upon millions of blogs in existence, and scan all their contents to figure it out.

That's where weblog searching comes in -- or at least, it's supposed to one day. When Google bought Blogger, home to about 200,000 active blogs, many folks in the know figured the buyout would improve Google's weblog searches. But right now, you can't click on a "weblog" tab on Google to search them, thus leaving specialty sites such as Daypop and Blogdex in the lead for weblog searches. Except that Google still gives more depth and breadth than them, as does AltaVista (recently bought by Overture).

In my unscientific, spur-of-the-moment research, I wanted to test some top weblog search sites (Daypop, Blogdex), one meta-blog called MetaFilter, along with vanilla search (Google, AltaVista) on one prominent Hollywood story that resonated in the blogosphere. In this case, it was the story that actor Martin Sheen, who plays the president on "West Wing," was taking heat from NBC execs for his very public anti-war stance. This was bound to raise the hackles of bloggers, many of whom cover every nuance of war doings.

And the winner isn't ...

For the speciality sites, the results were less than astounding. Blogdex gave many more links to media stories (like this one in the British Independent) than weblogs. Daypop fared better, but only when you included the word "blog" in the search -- and even better when you included "war." Choice comments came from conservatives like Israpundit and The Skeptical Blogger. One of Daypop's more interesting features is called "Word Bursts," which lets you gauge what bloggers are talking about, subject-wise. Unfortunately, this crowd is much more interested in hard news than Hollywood.

MetaFilter, which is basically a huge online bulletin board in the form of a blog, had nothing on Sheen and the recent flap with NBC. Typing in "Martin Sheen blog" in Google's search brought up a panoply of blogs from the left to right. Sure, some of them were old, but one of the best commentaries I found was from Brad Wellington, a post titled "Limousine Liberals," where he blasts Sheen for saying he has intelligence sources as if he were president. "Martin, you are not the president, you are an actor," Wellington deadpans.

AltaVista even outdoes Google, with recent blog attacks on Sheen right up top. The only problem is that some of the links, as with Google, go to the most recent posts on these Weblogs, instead of the exact post on Sheen. This is a problem that has vexed the search engines so far -- though Daypop and Blogdex are a bit more direct in this area.

I'd like to say the weblog indexers are a good resource for journalists covering showbiz. I'd like to say the top search sites give you even more dirt from blogs. But in the end, you'll have to prepare for a mound of sifting, linking, slow-churning pages, and the occasional dead end. In other words: still in beta, still a lot of work for someone on deadline, but eventually entertaining.

The Burning Question

Q: Which high-tech gadget has helped you do business better?

A: "As a journalist, I'm only as good as my 2,000-name contacts list, plus I'm a huge fan of all things tech, and especially of gadgets. So I swapped my Filofax for a nifty low-cost gadget that now keeps my contacts/calendar/schedule/memos accessible 24/7: I have the $29 Motorola Clip-On Organizer piggy-backed to my cell. (Motorola even gives you a nice leather case that fits the bigger profile.) I hate the idea of carrying two pieces of equipment, like a cell and a Palm, and this way I just have one. Yes, I know they're coming out with phones that do more stuff, but they're expensive and not yet state-of-the-art. I keep a primary version of my contacts/calendar/schedule/memos on my desktop, which is constantly being updated, and every day I make sure to 'TrueSync' to my Clip-On Organizer. Easy! Plus, I have a sense of security: even if I lose my phone with its Clip-On, or something malfunctions, I always have a backup organizer still in my computer. And I don't have to learn Palm-speak -- yet." -- Nikki Finke, Deadline Hollywood columnist, LA Weekly