There are quite a few good resources to help you follow the online face of the current Canadian Federal election campaign, but probably the most comprehensive set of tools has been built by our friends* at the Infoscape Research Lab in Toronto, who have built a really interesting suite in partnership with the CBC’s Ormiston Online. My personal favourite is the Blog MediaBuzz widget.

* Zach Devereaux, one of Infoscape’s researchers, is a long-term friend of Exvisu’s. Zach is a top-notch researcher with whom we’ve worked on some really great projects.

Last month I was working with Zach Devereaux (you can read some of his academic work with the team at Ryerson’s Infoscape Media Lab on the blogosphere surounding the liberal leadership race), who pointed out an excellent blog post from the Oxford Internet Institute that characterises some of the problems we here at Exvisu have come across regularly with Google Blog search.

A more insidious bug occurs with the language preferences. Google Blog Search will return fewer results when the Google interface language that you have specified in your Google preferences doesn’t match the language you want to search in.

Yesterday, Michael and I came across a brand new type of bug at Google Blog search: searches starting on Jan 1 2008 until the current date were only returning results dated after July 15. Of course now that I am writing this post, this problem seems to have been rectified. Strange indeed. Did anything special happen on July 15?

Feel free to try to reproduce all of the other bugs described in the OII post, those at least are longstanding and repeatable.

I don’t know about you but these problems make me want to cheer for all of those underdog search engines that are trying to break into market these days.

The core of the work we do at Exvisu is using network analysis tools to draw out interesting and (often) hidden relationships between concepts. There are a lot of companies doing similar work in different ways, including TextMap, which bills itself as “The Entity Search Engine”. Lots of great information there!