Topix.net adds blogs

Rich Skrenta posts that Topix.net just added thousands of blogs to their site, crawling them and categorizing them along with articles from thousands of mainstream sources.

Topix.net says they added the 15k "top weblogs" to their search results mixed in with mainstream news sources.

For example, a search for "Amazon Mechanical Turk" on Topix.net brings up articles from news sites and a few dozen blogs including my post.

It doesn't dive as deep as Technorati, Feedster, or Google Blog Search, but does give a good number of high quality results. I saw no spam in my search results for the examples I tried, something that is a serious problem on those other blog search engines.

Rich did say that the 15k blogs are just a start and that they hope to expand their coverage up to 1M weblogs. It'll be interesting to see if they can maintain their spammy-free goodness as they broaden their coverage.

Speaking of spam, Rich said:

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.

Lots of crap out there, isn't there?

For more on blog spam, see my earlier post, "How many feeds matter?", where I said that, based on Findory's experience and data from Bloglines, 95% or more of the supposed 20M+ weblogs out there appear to be fake, not useful, or spam.