Two big social news aggregators which use advanced algorithms (instead of crowd wisdom, like Digg or similar sites) to choose the most important news, Tailrank and Megite, launched a new feature - video search - almost at the same time. Furthermore, the video search functionality is very similar, which you can check for yourself here and here.

These two sites, together with Techmeme, which focuses only on IT, are basically neck to neck as far as functionality goes, and when one adds a new feature, others follow. As social news sites like Digg and Reddit grow they exhibit more and more weaknesses, at least if you’re an IT professional looking for real news and not just fun stuff from the internet, so these three sites, together with some others like Sphere and Spotback, are gaining more and more credibility as news sources.

By the way, it’s interesting that Mike Arrington of Techcrunch chooses Techmeme as a clear leader of the three, probably based on Alexa rankings. A quick look at Compete and Quantcast rankings reveals a different picture. Check it out:

Compete clearly puts Tailrank in the first place,

While Quantcast only has data for Tailrank, which *might* mean that it has more traffic than the other two.

Of course, these numbers don’t mean much, but the results are in agreement with my previous analysis of Alexa rankings in the sense that Alexa rankings are completely off. It also shows Alexa’s usual bias toward IT/technology oriented sites. Based on these limited comparisons I can’t really say whether Tailrank, Megite or Techmeme is the leader (when it comes to traffic), but I sure as hell wouldn’t trust Alexa.