News

Blogging Search With a Twist — Talk Digger

When I tried this site, it struck me as working very much like Technorati, except for a couple of differences — it appears to be a meta-search, AND it offers in-search-results previews of what you get (very nice.) Try Talk Digger at http://www.talkdigger.com/.

TalkDigger describes itself this way: “You have in hand the URL of a piece of news of the BBC, a blog post, a product page, or any other web page, and you want to know who is talking about it, you want to know what people have to say about it. You copy that URL, paste it in the Talk Digger search box and press Dig it!” I was all enthused; I thought Talk Digger was meta-searching online discussion forums.

Alas, when I ran a test URL (People Formerly Known as the Audience again) I found that the search results were being pulled from blog search engines — Google Blog Search, Technorati, Feedster, etc. The twist is that Talk Digger is also doing link: searches on regular search engines, and is kicking in Digg as well.

The search results don’t appear to have any date sorting, but are nicely designed — each list of results is broken out by source, and every result has a “Preview” button that gives you an in-page preview of the search result, which is much faster than going into and loading every individual site.

I thought Talk Digger was a nice site, then I found something that convinced me that Talk Digger went beyond nice to lovely. The tools section has a RSS feed generator page. Enter your URL, checkbox any/many/all of ten different sources (Technorati, Feedster, Digg, Google Blog Search, etc.) and Talk Digger will generate an RSS feed for tracking (meta-tracking?) that URL. Hot dig!

The results are different enough from my usual blog search (Technorati) that they’re worth looking at, and the in-result preview and RSS feed generator are terrific extras. Check it out!

Categories: News