Google Blog Search is out in beta and it looks like... well... blog search ?
John Battelle broke the news: Google has turned on the (widely expected) Blog Search functionality they had been working on for some time. Testing it on an ego feed delivers reasonably clean results, very quickly. By clean I mean that the dedupping of items seems to be effective: even if I publish 5 different feeds, my posts are only indexed and displayed once – whereas other search engines will typically display a result from one of the “native” feeds, and one from a managed feed (FeedBurner in my case). However they still display the results of spam/aggregate blogs.
As explained in the About section, BlogSearch pulls down site feeds and indexes blogs on the basis of that content. Which means that bloggers publishing only a partial feed will be partially indexed (Aha, would that be the reason for full feeds to become the standard ?). There is no specific ping beacon, Google seems to use weblogs.com to get the latest updates (since blo.gs was bought by Yahoo, I wonder if they will make a run for weblogs.com).
In terms of number of blogs indexed, I suspect that Google has yet to catch up with the other services which are indexing 15/16M feeds. I have spotted a few results on these services that are not yet showing up, but I suspect that it is only a matter of time.
Suggestions ? Have the results of searches default to “Sort by date” as opposed to “Sort by relevance” until this becomes part of the preferences. Also, I am not sure I would index the content of the editor field of the XML message. Searching for “Steve Rubel” returns all posts of Micropersuasion. Not super useful.
Charlene, SearchEngineWatch and Niall have more comments about the new service.
Whilst we are talking about new releases: the new Yahoo Mail is reportedly out in closed beta (via SiliconBeat).
Update: Anil and Mary have made a couple of great posts on the subject, and Bob Wyman is claiming that New-York is *the* place for blog search (don't think so Dude :-).
Do a Google Blog search for Technorati and the first result is Jason Kotte's August post entitled "So long, Technorati"!
Posted by: Steve Wilhelm | September 15, 2005 at 08:45 PM