Search Engine Enlightenment

The effervescent Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion today kicks off his blog series, 2006 Trends, with a promise of a new trend discussed every day for the rest of the year. He claims that's 10 trends for 10 days left in the year. I don't feel motivated enough to check the facts, so I'll take him at his word.

His first trend is one of those stupid simple yet brilliant ideas that makes you wonder why it doesn't exist already. If 2005 was the year of blog search, then 2006 will be the year of blog comments search.

Steve makes an excellent point that comments often contain very good information that sometimes clarify a point a blogger made or reveals it to be false. Yet you would be hard-pressed to find any comments in search engine results today. Sure, many comments are often of the personal-attack sort or proclamations of
"frist!", but I'm sure smart programmers can find a way to strip those
out.

As the big players try to find new sources of information to mine, comments do seem like a probable target. This effort will likely prove more difficult than it seems on the surface, however. Systems like Haloscan don't seem to be easily indexable, but you better bet that comments providerswill have a strong incentive to find a way to make their systems play well with Google and the others.