Need objective evaluation of RSS aggregators

Doc Searles wants something I’d love to have, objective evaluations of RSS search engines.

There are a bunch of services that search the Live Web (a term coined by this guy, by the way) and/or provide feeds of searches: Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, IceRocket, Pubsub and Technorati. They search more than a dozen million sources (mostly, but not only, blogs). And at least one of them has become what Adam Penenberg in WiredNews calls ‘a new public utility.’

So why doesn’t any industry analyst compare them in detail? Why don’t we see objective, reliable, authoritative, first-source studies comparing them?

Lawyers and law firms need to be listening to discussion on the Web via these aggregators. Trying to nail down for LexBlog’s clients, which aggregator/search engine or what ever you want to call them has been tough at best.

We’ve given up on using Technorati for our clients. We’re going to start training our clients to use Bloglines. I’ll let you know how it goes.