Google launches blog search
Google has launched its own competitor to the popular Technorati blog indexing site. The rather plainly titled Google Blog Search spiders the RSS feeds of sites that ping weblogs.com (and ‘other sites’, which aren’t specified). It currently has no means of submitting a feed manually (though the site claims this is coming soon) so if your blogging tool doesn’t support weblogs.com-type (XML-RPC) pings, then you are screwed (hint: most decent blogging tools, including MT and Wordpress, do). Aside from the indexing issue, there are some other imperfections in the system:
- The relatively small amount of content – at the moment it only indexes posts from June 2005 onwards (presumably when they got the spider working, incidentally I was wondering why my RSS feeds were getting so many hits :P) – with one site even claiming that it only offers 1/4 as many blogs as technorati
- Not integrated with the main Google interface the way that Images, News, Froogle etc. are – so people have to type in a different URL (and know it in the first place) to search it
At the moment, it doesn’t seem to be what blog-haters have been calling far (ie removing blogs from the main index, which to be fair to Google would be pretty damn difficult seeing as many use the same CMS tools as other types of website) – whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your point of view, although since you are reading this in a blog I’ll presume you’re not a blog hater 
See Also
September 14th, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Not a blog hater. But also not a Google Blog Search lover either…yet. They need to introduce an algorithm that reads from blogs that don’t ping weblogs.com or at ythe very least expand to many other services. The results are not comprehensive enough yet IMO. Of course, it is beta. Maybe they’ll improve it. I do love the SPEED and the RSS capability.
After a few loose ends, this really could be a terrifically competitive blog search engine.
BTW, nice name.
September 15th, 2005 at 8:52 am
Note to readers: don’t be confused by the name of the commenter above. It’s a funny coincidence
I didn’t really make it prominent enough in the post, but they WILL be checking ‘other services’ (presumably blo.gs, or potentially even technorati which would be ironic) for pings, they just didn’t specify which ones.