I first read about Blabble from a SJ Merc piece written by Michael Bazeley. What was notable from Michael’s article was the unique position/niche Blabble was taking in providing for-pay “pr data mining” on blog posts on behalf of (presumably) consumer products companies.
This morning, Search Engine Watch (SEW) has a short blurb indicating that Blabble is now offering consumers free blog search functionality (ala Feedster, Technorati et al); their developer blog claims that they will add natural language processing (from their for-pay solution) over time.
As the SEW blurb points out, the free search results on Blabble are, well, horrible at this point. I’ll be interested to see how their tech compares with, say, Feedster’s over time. (I’d also be interested in hearing from anyone who’s testing their for-pay service.)
Why should you care? Because, in my opinion, it’s about Feed search, not Blog search. And that means classifieds and all sorts of other interesting “content” may eventually be most effectively “discovered” through these new engines.