There’s certainly been a lot of blog searching buzz in the past few days, including announcements of new features from the big dogs like Bloglines and Technorati. Among the buzz is the newly launched, Australian based gnoos, which is trying to break into the blog searching world with a slightly different angle.

Their interface is as clean and sleek as their response time is quick. These are key factors in persuading users to return to your site time and time again. Michael mentioned that he would be able to spend quite some time on gnoos without being fatigued, and I whole-heartedly agree with him. There’s just something pleasant about the design decisions that were made for gnoos’s front end.

Some of the differentiating features include the ability to tag, rank, comment, and show the text of each blog post result. The first three features are similar to swicki’s social search aspects, the difference being that gnoos isn’t necessarily tied to a specific site, and is more of a general purpose blog search. Technorati could learn a thing or two about the type of community search that gnoos is bringing to the table via user interaction with search results.

The fourth feature is gnoos’s ability to pull up a blog post when clicking on the “more” link. The entire blog post is shown inline with the search results. Depending on who you’re speaking to, this could be a blessing, or a wolf in disguise. gnoos is allowing visitors to view blog content without visiting the blog or RSS feed. For sensitive content producers, this could be controversial, either due to financial or copyright concerns. gnoos does have a copyright policy in their Terms of Use page, where they say that they

will never knowingly infringe (or be involved in infringing) the intellectual property rights of others.

In addition, gnoos might run up against the same wall as Google did with their page caching, where private posts that were deleted might be easily recovered. Hopefully gnoos won’t ever have to deal with privacy and copyright issues. Personally, I don’t mind my posts being on 3rd party search engines. The way I see it, the more exposure my content gets, the better.

Perhaps the most interesting tactic that gnoos is bringing to the table is localization. gnoos is heavily localized to Australia, and shows it by allowing visitors to filter by “Aussie Blogs” and “Aussie Media.” I find that localization is something that has been overlooked by many startups, and indeed, it is the secret weapon that gnoos has to gain significant market share in Australia. What would be cool is for gnoos to take the lead in localization and start localizing blogs for other parts of the world. However, I doubt that this is their strategy.

Currently, the content on gnoos is much smaller than Technorati. Their fast querying speed may be a result of their small database. If this is the case, we’ll have to see how well they scale up as they index more of the blogosphere.

Good luck to the underdogs!

Simple web services that are easy to use is something that we all take for granted. A lot of apps out there try to do too much, and end up not doing much at all for many users. Montastic, a website monitoring service, is not one of these apps.

I’ve been using Montastic ever since the launch of BuzzShout, and it’s definitely a reliable tool that just works. You simply add the website that you want monitored, and it will ping it (with the minimum interval being 10 minutes), and will alert you via RSS, email, or Yahoo Widget with the status of your site. I’ve found it a lifesaver of a tool during the times when one of DreamHost’s servers go down–I’m usually the first to alert them about it when I see the Montastic status.

And, that’s about all the functionality that Montastic brings to the table. The key is they do it, and they do it well. The service is totally free, and the people behind Montastic, Metadot, actually rely on the service themselves for their sites. The effort behind Montastic is all done in goodwill and in the spirit of sharing useful applications, which is a breath of fresh air amidst other apps that only jockey their position for financial gain.

Montastic is built with Ruby on Rails and AJAX.