Below, a roundup of bloggers and others talking about the new Google Blog
Search service that’s been launched. For more background on the service, see our
Google
Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search and
Thoughts On &
Poking At Google Blog Search posts.
Google’s new blog search makes a great first impression has Robert Scoble
doing an ego search for himself and finding it sucks because his blog isn’t
tops. Except it is tops but shows “Velveetaland” as the domain. Why? Glitch,
hijacking, I dunno. But the actual link does lead directly to his site. He
loves the speed and the relevance when doing an advanced search for
scoble PDC, sorted by date.
The only “advanced” thing there really is that he set results to show 100
listings rather than 10. Otherwise, it’s just a multiword query. FYI, use the
preference options to set results to 100 results permanently. Bad news? That
does it for ALL of Google and doesn’t let you have a sort by date preference,
as I’ve written. Google Blog Search really needs its own preferences page just
for that service, allowing sort by date as a lockdown option.
More playing
with Google blog search has him Robert playing more and liking Google more
better, and
Testing link search out on Google blog search especially in getting
backlinks.
Google adds blog search from Dave Winer doesn’t seem happy you can get
results in either RSS or Atom. Yeah, pick a format and go with it. Of course,
if they picked Atom, he wouldn’t be happy. So no surprise they decided to
offer them both. He’s also concerned that if he does a post without a title,
Google doesn’t seem to “have it.” I don’t see that. Here are
results for his site. Here’s the first result:
http://archive.scripting.com/2005/09/14#When:8:19:23AM
46 minutes ago
NPR has a podcast about the Roberts hearings. I caught a bit of it yesterday
and
it was really interesting. Surprisingly so.
Scripting News – http://www.scripting.com/
They’ve got the post — they just don’t have a title because the post
doesn’t have a title. Solution? Give posts titles. But it may be he’s
concerned that many of his posts don’t appear when compared to Google web
search. My other article explains this is the memory problem — they only have
info from March 2005 onward in Google blog search.
Google launches blog search is this the death knell for Technorati, et. al?
from Forrester’s Charlene Li comes out generally positive about the service.
But the idea of Google stripping out “non-blog feeds” like weather and stock
quote updates. Not what they tell us. Haven’t poked hard enough to test, but
if it’s a feed, there’s a chance it’s in there. Only sites they know are in
their hand-picked source list for Google News are potentially removed from
Google Blog Search, we’ve been told.
- Welcome to the
Blogosphere, Google! from Technorati’s David Sifry doesn’t have him
putting Technorati in a casket but instead saying the competition will make
things better for everyone.
Google Blog Search is live from Technorati’s Niall Kennedy talks about
blog search as a potential new testing ground for search marketers. Not
really. It’s based off feeds, and the ranking is going to be much different
than the full text indexing of web pages that web search uses. But then
again, if you haven’t yet starting running a proper blog, time to start doing
them. As I said at an SES conference recently, they’re the “acceptable” mirror
site. IE, have a regular site and a blog, and that’s just fine to the search
world, assuming they do different things. And you should, because as you can
see, to play in blog search, you need a blog. An ordinary site doesn’t get in
to have fun.
Google Blog Search reviewed at Blog Herald thinks the link counts suck
compared to the competition. Chances are, this is because the Google blog
“memory” stretches back only to March 2005, as I wrote. Similar criticism over
size of coverage, and chances area again that history is the issue.
Google launches Blog Search at Six Apart, spotted
via John Battelle,
focuses more on Six Apart’s AtomStream service that’s in development, that
flows out all the content of LiveJournal and TypePad content to any tool that
wants them. Pinging and crawling might be eliminated if everyone just flowed
out full information this way.
Yes, except that blog/feed search services are increasingly encountering the
same spam problems that web search has had to grapple with. Expect that if
anyone can flow content, some are going to making use of this nice cloaking
mechanism to be misleading.
THAT’s why web search engines crawl. The idea of flowing information to them
isn’t something they never thought off until now. They’ve simply learned not
to trust what people might give to them. As blog spam continues to grow — IE,
“fake” doorway page style blogs — the blog search world is going to learn in
short order that flowing info may not work as well as they think.
I really do hope some better solution will come about so people can feed
content into the major services, rather than just sending URLs. Certainly
Google’s Froogle has seemed successful on this front.
Google Launches Blogsearch from InsideGoogle posts thoughts here and finds
that overall, it’s likely to pull people from other blog search services.
- Google Blog Search Launched
is discussion at Threadwatch.
- Via Barry’s
Search Engine Roundtable site, see also discussion at
DigitalPoint Forums,
Cre8asite Forums and
WebmasterWorld.
Google Blog Search Launched is discussion on our Search Engine Watch Forums.
NEW ITEMS SINCE ORIGINAL POST
Google Launches a Blog Search from Tara at ResearchBuzz who likes somethings,
hates others, but especially thinks the default should be by date. I’m with you,
Tara — sort of. Problem for Google is that when you search by data, relevancy
drops like made. Searches for [google] still bring back tons of junk/spam. Tara
also details some of the URL switches used to get the number of results back,
for those who want to dig really deep. She says site: works; I still find it
does NOT.
WAIT, MYSTERY SOLVED! I REALIZE IT WORKS IN COMBINATION WITH ANOTHER QUERY.
In other words,
site:napsterization.org brings back nothing but
mary hodder -site:napsterization.org will work. Google web search used to
not allow site: as a standalone search but that was changed a few months to a
year ago, if I recall correctly. Blog search has yet to realize this and depends
instead on blogurl: as the command.
- Dear
Google, Thank you for blog search has Jason Calacanis expecting blog search
to show up on the Google home page. Yeah, maybe. More likely, I think you’ll see
it combined with news, especially since there’s only so many buttons you can put
up there. Note to Jason — no search engine wants to look like
this,
and people don’t see those tabs/links anyway as the article that link leads to
explains.
Jason also completely overlooks the fact that plenty of news search services
already put great small and individual publishers into the results there
alongside MSM — mainstream media or “traditional media.” In fact, I’d wager the
vast majority of news search sources in any major news search service are NOT
traditional media outlets. So ease off the idea that this is a precursor to the
big leveling of web society. Web search was already a leveler and remains so.
Realistically, news and blogs go together as well as news and opinion go
together. The two sides of the same coin and all that. Need that illustrated
more. The new Memeorandum site does the blend well, as I
explained
yesterday.
- Google
Launches Blog Search from Mary Hodder who has done a great series on blog
search recently finds an ego search for her name doesn’t get all references
(it’s likely the memory problem mentioned above, Mary).
She also doesn’t like that a serach for her own blog name bringing up her own
pages over and over is annoying. Yep, and if if were web search, Google’s
clustering (showing you only up to two pages from the same site per results
page) would have solved this. No clustering for blog search. Easy workaround,
however.
napsterization -site:napsterization.org. There you go — your
self-referential problem disposed of.
She also notes no change in relevance when doing a link lookup and sorting by
date or relevance. Betcha I know why. Google may simply not want to tell you
what link it thinks has the most link juice flowing to a site.
Overall, she thinks they’ve got a lot to learn about blog search. Probably, but
it also sounds like that perhaps tailoring some of her regular searches with a
few search commands might also get more of what she wants.
NEW ITEMS SINCE LAST UPDATE ABOVE
- One Service,
Two Faces from Ken Yarmosh highlights how the Blogger version makes a search
within and find all posts feature available for listings. You could do this with
the Google version, just not as easily.
- Google
Introduces Blog Search from Tristan Louis wants to see one of the major
search engines offer their own ping server. From talking with Google, they seem
more behind the idea of supporting the development of
FeedMesh
as a solution.
Blog Search: Redirects and Indexing from the official Blogger blog, spotted
via InsideGoogle, notes that the redirect page you see when clicking on a
result in blog search will be going away, now that it is no longer needed to
help protect the secrecy of the project.
- After Just
a Few Hours With Google Blog Search: Comments and Wishes from our own Gary
Price has him giving a laundry list of wish, as well as showing how non-blog
content is in the blog search engine and how SafeSearch fails to keep you
safe.
We may add more items as we see them and as time allows. In the meantime,
need more? See the new Memeorandum Tech
page, and the new Google blog search is the top item, with tons and tons of
links to discussion from across the web.
Want to comment or discuss? Visit the
Google Blog Search Launched thread in our Search Engine Watch Forums.