Okay, so the big weblog news of the day is that Google have launched their Blog Search. First impressions are that it doesn’t feel right, that quite a lot of the spririt of the weblogs and the faces of the people involved come through better via Technorati, and it doesn’t seem to leverage as much of Google’s other functionality as you’d expect (when I do a search for Matt Webb for example, it doesn’t bring back interconnected.org as a recommended weblog, even though it’s the #1 entry for Matt Webb in their main index, and they already know that site is a weblog).
But of course they are going to have some advantages. Unlike Technorati I pretty much guarantee that they’re not going to suffer problems with scaling their infrastructure, and that’s going to make them more reliable. And of course they have the Google brand behind them. I suspect this one will go through a couple of iterations before it feels right. Makes me wonder if all the rumours about Technorati being about to be acquired were right, and – more interestingly – makes me wonder whether it’s less or more likely to happen now that Google have shown that large search engines should be interested.
9 replies on “In which Google launches blog search…”
That’s interesting. I suspect it’s because I have a shoddy RSS feed which – shockingly – doesn’t include any author details, so doesn’t include my name (except in the description), not my email address. You’re right that they should be able to make deductions from their main index… but I wonder whether they’re seeing how far they can go with *just* RSS and Atom feed searching for the moment (it doesn’t look like they do site scraping)?
Now, have a look at pubsub.com, and see that they push their updates out over Jabber (XMPP). That’s a great foundation for developers to build market intelligence apps into their intranets. Google have just launched a huge XMPP infrastructure in the form of Google Talk, and already deliver timely updated for Google Mail. An API over that, for blog searches, would be great fun.
I wish there was a “don’t show me results from blogs” option as well, that would be useful sometimes when you’re looking for specific information and not two hundred bloggers complaining about something.
I could give you a big list what is missing, starting from “why can’t I limit search easily based on time (today, yesterday)” over more options on display to “I want tags”.
But the main reason why I am excited is this: It is competition. One thing google clearly does is index and store with fast responses. Technorati may be better in all it’s features – but it is no use because the relevant information are not picked up.
It is great that you can search on tags, topics, words based on incomming links – when those links never get into the system. I am looking more closely for some friends also at the moment: Technorati only picks up about 50% of the links and tags.
So, what does it mean for the rest of us? We will have a Yahoo Blog search soon, MSN will follow and smaller services will grow and expand to do a better job. Perfect. Everything a customer wants.
For paranoid egotists such as myself who like to know what people have been saying about them, the link:URL feature makes a damn good replacement for Technorati. Results sorted by date; its own RSS feed; and it’s already thrown up some results which Technorati had missed.
Ooh I didn’t notice that. I find technorati quite annoying – maybe for no good reason, but this feels quite nice and a few iterations later will probably work much better.
Mike that is not paranoid but basic monitoring of your surrounding. As I have different blogs, I was going over my feedlist one day and telling myself that I have too many of them.
Once I substracted the amount of neccessary “ego feeds”, it felt better. All of the engines out there – be it Technorati (worst), pubsub, feedster etc have some part of the linkage.
I expect Google not to get those 40% of the links but more to 90%. And to be faster and more reliable. 🙂
If it forces the Technorati guys to get off their asses and write a scalable, reliable backend, that would be great. They have a pretty site, and they seem to know a lot of A-list bloggers, but their service has been a turd for quite a while.
The google blog search is GREAT. I will never use technorati again.
Why? It’s fast.
I don’t care about all the extra cruft that Technorati added, all I want to do is search blogs.
Google does this in under a second. It’s a joy to use.
I wish there was a “don’t show me results from blogs” option as well, that would be useful sometimes when you’re looking for specific information and not two hundred bloggers complaining about something.