Google Blog Search

This is the day that everyone saw coming, Google announced their new service: Google Blog Search. There is plenty of commentary on this already, so I’ll try to keep my comments simple and to the point. It may be helpful to read my complaints on feed search from August 2004.

The first place to start looking for details is the Blog Search FAQ. Questions one and four indicate that they are focusing blogs, specifically blogs that have feeds. So if your blog doesn’t have a feed you might not be included. What isn’t clear is if they are rejecting feeds from non-blog sites. Question five points to how Google “discovers” blogs. They mention Weblogs.com, but not their own ping site. Perhaps they are participating in FeedMesh? They started indexing in June 2005, so you probably won’t find posts earlier than that for now.

Now to the meat, searching. Search results seem to fall into two categories: blogs and posts. So doing a search for Joseph lists my blog under “Related Blogs”, but none of my posts showed up in the search results. This isn’t really surprising since I have posted anything in the last few days. You can also do a search to find out who has been linking to you with link:example.com syntax. I’ve added to my list of reference search list to see who is linking to my blog.

The default sort order is by relevance, with the option to sort by date. I’ll assume that their relevance sorting is using some form of Page Rank, but I couldn’t find anything to confirm that. I’m sure the search engine optimization (SEO) folks will be offering selling methods for increasing your Google Blog Search Page Rank any moment now. Presumably Yahoo! has also been working on a feed search feature, which will give the SEO folks one more thing to get all worked up over.

The feature that I didn’t see in Google’s Blog Search is support for tags. This was disappointing, but not really surprising. Hopefully if/when Yahoo! does blog/feed search they’ll supports tags, which would compliment their My Yahoo 2.0 features.

Over all I’d call this a good start, but it definitely needs keep growing. I’d refrain from calling the time of death for the likes of Technorati, but the potential is there.

UPDATE 16 Sep 2005 @ 3:50pm: Bob Wyman pointed out that Google plans to join FeedMesh.