Om Malik reports that Google have launched Google Blog Search - a search engine that sticks to searching blogs only. Hence the rather clever name.
There’s clearly a massive gap for blog search, especially as Technorati seemed to lose the plot a couple of months back. While services like Feedster and IceRocket valiantly stepped into the breach, neither offer anything like a comprehensive service.
But I can’t help feeling that Google’s missed the point somewhat.
I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that the major (or certainly a major) use of blog search is by bloggers themselves. And much of the reason for searching is to find out when other people are linking to your blog.
This isn’t vanity at all. Well, OK, maybe it is a bit. But mainly it’s so you can track conversations, respond to other posts and basically stay in tune with the Blogosphere. And it’s also quite cool when some A Lister writes something flattering.
But probably the most frequent linker to any blog is the blogger themselves. We’re constantly referring back to previous posts, which might embellish a point or supplement what we’re writing at that particular time. But, when I do a blog search, the last thing I want to see is all those links that we’ve made to ourselves.
But with Google Blog Search, the first 50 or so results for “mobhappy” turn out to be links from MobHappy. Which makes it next to useless, as far as I’m concerned.
The other issue I have with it is that it’s very easy to miss the RSS link to that search and I’m sure it’ll be overlooked by many potential users.
So as a day-to-day tool, it’s basically useless for my needs. But then, I may well have made the classic error of assuming that everyone behaves like me. So what do you think? Is it any good for how you use, or want to use, Blog Search?
It only seems to search exisiting blog providers! What about all us who write our own bespoke stuff and don’t rely on the ‘corporates’. Typical inncorrect assumption on the part of google.boo..
Dave, my site (Vegan Porn) is all custom code, and it’s listed in the results. According to the FAQ, the results are supposed to include anything with an RSS feed that pings an updating service like weblogs.com, but VP doesn’t ping anything, so who knows…
I’m excited about the potential of a fast, frequently updated feed of blogs that use keywords (to start, I’ve added a feed for “vegan” to my newsreader), and if it works, I’m sure I’ll add others - this’ll help me keep track of other news items and discussions. I tried doing this with Technorati awhile back, but the results were disappointing.
Russell, I’m with you on the vanity search thing - searching for your own site name is a waste of time at present. Hopefully the “Beta” tag is an actual indication that things are still changing this time, and it’s not just become an official Google brand…
To exclude mobhappy from google search results (not specific to blog search, in fact), you should query it for something like “mobhappy -site:mobhappy.typepad.com“
Or you can see who’s linking to you by searching for link:mobhappy.typepad.com.
You can even drill down and limit your results to a certain date set–just check the advanced search.
In typical Google style it’s very simple, but there is some powerful stuff lurking behind the scenes.
Thanks for the tips, guys.
But this kind of stuff isn’t obvious to the layman and it can’t be found easily and quickly either.
At the very least they need to improve some basic explanations.
Cheers
Russell
Google Blog Search beta
Google Blog Search BetaLooks like Google has a blog search engine after all - Google Blog Search beta. The screenshot is a search on voip blog. click the image above for a larger view of Google Search Beta I’m listed…
Ciao,
I develope applications using Flash Lite and today after Google released the blogs service I created a Flash Lite application for Mobile phones. It is used inside my application/platform Kero
It took me 20 minutes to do it !!
Alessandro