More Google: It has a Blog Search now
Category: Navel Gazing... Tech...
Posted Monday, September 19, 2005 at 06:02 PM [GMT-6]

Google has rolled out a beta version of its new Blog Search feature. This allows you to limit your searches to blogs (and, yes, they are indexing non-Blogger blogs).

I suppose that Google's entry into this part of the search business invites comparison to the previous big dog of blog searches, Technorati. Now, I realize that there are some who are underwhelmed with Technorati, but I, personally, don't have any complaints other than slow page loading. I still think that Technorati's tags have a useful place in organizing data on the web and, frankly, the Gazette is getting a lot of hits from the service.

Anyway, I did a quick and very unscientific comparison of Google's Blog Search and the similar function over at Technorati. I used the title of this recent post, containing the relatively uncommon term of "Hip Action," as my test case. Even though the post was loaded less than 24 hours ago, it shows up in the results of both searches. In Google, it's the sixth result listed, while in Technorati it's number two on the list. However, when you sort Google's results by date rather than relevance (Technorati's results are automatically sorted by date and there's no way to change it), the Gazette's post is #1.

As you would expect from Google, its blog search has some cool options, including the ability to search only in blogs with certain words in their titles, or to search for certain words in post titles, rather than in the body of the post itself. It also has Google's familiar "Safe Search" option if you want to keep the results family-friendly.

One thing I noticed but didn't attempt to quantify or investigate further is that Google's results appear to have more "spam blogs" or commercial blogs. I'm sure that's because it automatically includes every Blogger.com and Blogspot account in its database and I suspect they are the most frequently used and abused services for those types of sites.

I'm not sure that the world needs another blog search engine, but a little competition is good for everyone. If nothing else, it might cause Technorati to get serious about fixing some of the things that people are complaining about.

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Comments

Eric,

I've been following the deba...er, converstaion about Technorati and its challenges via Fresh Blog (blogfresh.blogspot.com). The author, John, specializes in hacks for blogger, especially with regard to categories, which is how I found it.

Google's blogsearch is nice, though I still like Technorati's layout and (search) flexibility. T'rati does have some real issues however, and the slow speed of the cosmos search (which seems to have improved markedly in recent days) is quite annoying.

One of the hot button topics right now seems to be whether to have summarized or full posts in your outbound feeds. I think some people may have a tad too much time on their hands.

Posted by: Jim at September 19, 2005 08:50 PM

Jim, that full-post-vs-excerpt debate in RSS feeds is actually an old one, but I guess it gets resurrected from time-to-time as new players come on the scene. It's actually got more relevance than it might seem at first glance, depending on your reasons for blogging.

Posted by: Eric at September 19, 2005 09:08 PM

I'm all ears if you'd like to explain further, though you don't have to do that. I've been somewhat bemused by how exercised some people get over this stuff. It is interesting if only from a sociological perspective.

Posted by: Jim at September 19, 2005 09:51 PM

Well, the problem arises if you really, really need visits to your blog...rather than just knowing (or thinking) that people are reading what you wrote. Like, say, you're making a bunch of money from Google ads or similar commercial endeavors. If you're providing the entire post in your RSS feed, people don't have to come to your site and thus are bypassing the opportunity to click on your ads.

From the sociological perspective you mentioned, there are those who also don't want to miss the hits on their counter, so they provide only an excerpt in their feed.

Now, I fall into the category of those who provide just the excerpt, because that's what I want to see when I use my newsreader. I recognize that not everyone browses in the same manner, but that's where I came down on the issue.

Plus, I think there's less chance that people will leave comments if they read the post via newsfeed. I like reading and responding to comments; that's part of the fun of blogging.

Posted by: Eric at September 19, 2005 10:03 PM

Agreed.

I had blogger publishing an abbreviated feed and I switched it over to full a couple of days ago just to see if it made any difference in number of hits and number of comments.

I guess if I want more trafffic I could just try writing decent posts, but that would take both work and thought. Yikes!

Posted by: Jim at September 20, 2005 02:07 PM

I guess if I want more trafffic I could just try writing decent posts...

Dang. That sounds a little extreme to me.

I'll be interested to hear the results of your experiment.

Posted by: Eric at September 20, 2005 02:18 PM
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