- the basic bones of the technology seem to be there.
- basically it seems to be using similar (or the same) technology as Google News.
- they seem to be indexing new posts very quickly which is great.
- the pool of blogs that they are indexing seems smaller than I’d have expected. Of course they’ll be adding new feeds to track over time
- they will have a big challenge of filtering spam – I’ve already seen quite a few spam posts in it both in the ‘related blogs’ and the actual posts that they are indexing
- I’m disappointed with the ‘related blogs’ results – I’ve seen spam blogs, blogs that havn’t been updated for 6 months and know it’s omitting major blogs in certain niches. It seems from testing that the blogs served here are very related to the title of the blog concerned rather than the content in my initial tests.
- The ability to subscribe via RSS to search terms is fantastic – top marks Google.
- Being able to see results both ‘by date’ and ‘by relevance’ is a good thing.
- The Advanced search functionality seems to offer more options than most other blog search tools that I’ve seen.
Overall – the technology is promising. It is in beta so we can’t expect too much I guess but I hope they make some improvements on some of the above areas.
I’ll also be fascinated to see how this impacts blog’s search result positioning in the main Google index. Will it lead to them being indexed faster and higher? Or is this a step towards downgrading their importance in the main index.
Update: Which indexes posts quicker – Google Blog Search or Technorati? The first one to index this post was Google in 50 minutes. The strange thing is that when I entered the index I entered it way down the page and not as the most recent post. Technorati is yet to index this post – however it has indexed considerably more in the mean time than Google.
Update II: Other reviews and first looks of Google Blog search can be found at:
– Anil’s first look at ProNet
– Paul’s Predictions
– Duncan’s Review
– Chris Pirillo has a massive list of posts from around the web on Google Blog Search
Intereseted to hear your reviews of Google Blog Search in comments below.
