Ping Google

Google has announced their new ping service. You can find out more details in their ping FAQ, but for people running their own blogs you’ll more likely to interested in the XML-RPC ping API. You can see a list of recent pings to Google at http://blogsearch.google.com/changes.xml, which shows pings received in the last 5 minutes.

I’m rather surprised that it took this long for one of the big three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) to provide a ping service. I guess you could claim that Yahoo already does this via their purchase of Blog.gs, but I haven’t seen them talk that service up since the purchase.

So now for some of the obvious questions. Like, what happens to Ping-O-Matic now? In the short term it is unlikely that anything will change since they’ve been doing this so long. Combined with the fact that WordPress ships with Ping-O-Matic turned on by default makes for sizable user base out the gate. But over the long term will people continue use, or will more people move to Google ping? Then there are all of the other services out there that accept pings (like Technorati), what sort of long term impact will this have?

Like most ping services, Google intends for this to be used for blog updates. There is nothing to stop people from using it for other types of websites though (forums, ecommerce, etc), so they probably will. Then there is the dark side of blog pings: spam. Ping spam is a huge problem. I didn’t see any mention of how they would be dealing with this, but they’ll have to on some level. Expect people to try and game this as much as they do Googlebot.

Perhaps this is a sign that Google is ready to get more involved in the world of blogs. (Yes, I know they own Blogger, but really, what have they done with that since they purchased it?)