John Battelle reports that Google are about to Launch Blog Search:
‘Tonight Google will announce (well, the embargo is tonight at 9 pm PST) that it is launching blog search, in two flavors, one for blogger.com, and another as a beta at google.com/blogsearch (not yet up, but will be soon…).
I spoke with Google about this, more soon, wanted to get this up in a timely manner…(too timely…as the service has yet to be pushed live….)’
He then updates that the link for the wider beta test is http://blogsearch.google.com/
This is pretty significant news.
Update: It’s up and live.
Update II: Duncan has a first impression review of the new Google Blogsearch. Like he says – the best bit about it is that that you can put search terms into an RSS feed.
On the down side – most of the searches I’ve done don’t list a lot of the blogs I’d have expected to see there and they include quite a few sites that are anything but blogs. I guess this is where most of the criticism will come from.
Update III: Unfortunately a lot of the blogs that I’ve seen it suggesting as ‘related blogs’ on certain topics either lead back to Google’s home page, are spam blogs on the blogger.com network or are very very out of date and have not been updated for months.
Ah, finally Google is getting on board with a dedicated blog search – great news. This will shake up the blogosphere no dount and we’ll all win froim this extra exposure.
Although I’m a bit worried about them pushing Blogger.com – hope they don’t give blogger.com blogs more value seeing they own it. Let’s wait and see.
Yeah, hopefully it will be up to date and help all of our blogs be more accessable. i can’t wait to see it in action! It alwasy seems like when Google does it, it is done right and works pretty darn good.
It should be interesting to see what it defines as a blog. Whether it is something using a particular blogging system (WordPress, MT etc), or whether it is any site that it updated regularly, with ‘Blog’ in the title.
I hope that it doesn’t degate from blog results showing in the standard Google search results. That would be a real shame.
Good point David, never thought of that … it would be a real shame if blogs would get lesser value in the standard search because of this – that would be a bad thing then. I wonder how many people when searching would select the blog tag if specifically looking for a blog – whereas the standard search it’s a free for all.
more reason to wait and see. And it’s true Jon, when Google decides to move onto something it usually does it right.
Looks like the definition is any site that publishes a feed and pings an updating service.
[…] Just found out from Darren at ProBlogger.net that Google will be launching a Blog Search. (via John Battelle) […]
Hi,
This is a very interesting news. I just checked out the advanced blog search, have the following observations to make
1. David makes a good point about the definition of the blog. If you compare the google advanced search and google advanced blog search, one of the options is “with these words in the post title”. Also, there is an option to filter the results by date, down to a single day in the blog search whereas in the standard google search, there are only 3 options (last 3 months, 6 months and a year). Based on these options, i think they define blog as a website that is updated regularly. Probably they should add a line or two in the main blog search page explaining what they define as a blog (the about page does give lot of information)
2. Do they have any plans to add filters to search only podcasts and video blogs?
3. As David says, they it isn’t a good idea to give lesser weight to blog results in the standard results page. If a user specifically wants to ignore blog results while using the standard search, they can always give an option (similar to the file format filter)
4. The search results lead to the latest post that has been indexed, rather than the home page of the blog. But a blog list appears on the top.
maruthi.
As others have already said, it will be VERY interesting to see what effect this has on Google’s view of blogs in standard search results. Especially if you are like me and a few of my clients who include blogs as part of their main web site wether it be e-commerce, information or corporate sites. Will Google then define the whole site as a blog or just the blog. It would be great if when Google launch a new search product they communicate to the web community a little bit about how they do what they do. I know there is a certain amount of detail that needs to be kept close to their chest to keep SEO’s on their toes and also regarding commercially sensitive information but it would be good to know something behind the new engine to stop unnecessary theorising and mis-information
[…] As previously reported by John Battelle and Darren Rowse, Google not only announced but published their own Blogsearch. The system which is of course a beta works in two different categories as you can separate between searching only Blogger.com blogs or all (rather independent) blogs. […]
[…] via Darren Rowse, Google has launched a blog search tool for, well, searching blogs. Why? I’m not sure, but I bet MSN offers a competitor within days. […]
I think most sites these days are blogs, a blog is alot better of a way to present a site, all sites should be setup like blogs.
[…] Pointer from ProBlogger. […]