IceRocket Adds Blog Search to New Features
IceRocket, the search engine that has been hailed by many for their approach to “pioneering commercial search by putting the interests of wants and consumers before advertisers” has recently added some new features which are sure to increase their buzz – but not as much as having Mark Cuban as an investor did. Recently IceRocket added two new tools that even help to position it more as an alternative search engine with its loyal users.
IceRocket’s Blog Search marks IceRocket as one of the first top to mid tier search engines that has opened its doors to blog searching (Yahoo has recently embraced RSS, but the major search engines have left blog searching, well to the blog search engines) and an interesting live time search reporter called IceSpy.
Blake Rhodes, CEO of IceRocket, notes on his blog “Hopefully by now everyone knows what a blog is, it’s a personal weblog where people can express their thoughts and views, an online diary of sorts. 2005 will be the year of the blog, mark my words, many people are just finding out about them and soon everyone will be blogging. We felt it was about time that a search engine created a section specifically for searching Blogs, so we did it.”
IceRocket’s Blog Search index works from a database of RSS feeds from blogs only. When asked what made IceRocket get into blog searching Rhodes told the Search Engine Journal “It is something we have been planning for a while now. Both Mark and I love Blogs, we recently launched an official IceRocket blog (BlogIceRocket.com) and of course Mark has his blog (Blogmaverick.com). As I have said before 2005 will be the year of the blog and we felt someone needed to provide a blog search.”
Rhodes added that IceRocket’s blog search updates as soon as an indexed blog posts a new entry and by rolling out a blog search before Google and Yahoo that “this is just another example of how we will differentiate ourselves from the pack. We have a few other things we are eager to unveil this fall.”
Blake is looking for feedback on IceRocket’s Blog Search.
IceSpy is a real time tracker of IceRocket searches which holds no bars in its reporting. So if a couple of X-rated terms leave you queasy, IceSpy does give its viewers a forward warning – “The following page may contain search terms that some may find to be obscene and/or offensive. You certify that you are of the legal age in the jurisdiction from which you are accessing this page, or any pages, containing adult material. You acknowledge all responsibility for viewing the material that follows.” Other than the occassional silly term, IceSpy is a cool way to see what people are searching for on IceRocket and the different niches of search queries which are performed on an ongoing basis.
IceRocket has also release a new toolbar offering their search box (of course) along with a news ticker, Alexa rankings, related links, site info, and a dictionary. While most toolbars are available only for Microsoft IE browsers, IceRocket offers a version for Mozilla FireFox at IceRocket FireFox.
Besides Blog Search and IceSpy, Blake also tells the Search Engine Journal that IceRocket is not finished with its future plans “We are about to add a phone pics section with only pictures taken from cell phone cameras(moblogs). We have a lot of stuff happening right now.”
