Google's Blog Search

markpapadakis writes "Google BlogSearch beta is out. Clean UI, fast responses, not yet such a great index, but it is getting there. That's what you should find in the much-awaited new Google service. Some say Technorati and friends have been having nightmares about this very day."

Blog Spam

[elkyle]

Great.

Now Google indexes blogspam twice as much. Hopefully, the blog index won't affect Pagerank. If it did, then we would just see more and more blog spam. As an administrator of a small blog site, I have enough trouble as it is keeping up with the blog spam.

Defined by publishing a site-feed

[TigerTale]

Google's Blog Search FAQ explains [google.com] that sites are indexed by their site feeds. So if your site publishes either an RSS or an Atom feed, it is--by this definition--a blog.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[nuclear305]

Please let this mean that blogs are now excluded from the main google search?? Why can't they add an extra tab (sites, images, news, blogs)?

From a webmaster perspective it's not as easy as you would think to keep sites (such as blogs) out of google's index. A long time ago I set up my robots.txt properly; included all the special noindex/nocache meta tags and even used Google's automated-removal system. This worked fine for a few months...and suddenly hundreds of indexed pages of mine showed up in the index again as 'Supplemental Results'

Cool, site search works!

[bad_outlook]

Site search works, just click Advanced Blog Search -> and enter the site URL in "In blogs at this URL. Click search and you'll get a resultspage" >like this. Looks like another easy way to add google search to your site (I know mine is crawled constantly by bots, esp google)

What is a blog for Google? How to get listed

[Betabug]

The way to get your blog listed and also the answer to "what makes a
blog a blog for Google":

Quote:
How do I get my blog listed?

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings
an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and
list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to
manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven't picked it up
automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.
End Quote

Which means that your page becomes a blog if it you ping a blog updating
service like weblogs.com. Which is likely the reason why my blog is
ranking well on google, but not present in the blogsearch beta.

And yes, I'm not posting any news about hamsters and gf's, though you
might find excerpts from error logs with what solved the probem.

Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Google only seems to be interested in far left wing blogs and ignores many mainstream center-right blogs. We have seen the same issue with google news, stuff from loony left sites pops up there all the time, but they willfully block many conservative sites.

Re:Well, it does work.

[ahaning]

OMGWTFBBQ (the SA admin) was in an IRC channel and they were coming up wth random acronyms.

He explains this in the SAclopedia:

Way back when, I used to work for a few online Mac Gaming websites. Inside Mac Games, Mac Gamer's Ledge, MacGamer, etc. During that time, I was often to be found on GameRanger, a Mac equivalent to Gamespy Arcade (it's actually better if you ask me). Anyhow, there was another Mac gaming website run by a few Mac gamers with a sense of humor, Utterer.com, which was headed by none other than Frank "Utterer" Caratozzolo. Frank was also always on GameRanger, and we always chatted.

One day, a person logged into GameRanger that was just a bit too AOLish for our tastes. As in, every time the guy said anything in chat, it had a "OMG" or a "LOL" or a "ROFLMAO" attached to it. Of course this gets annoying rather quickly, and Frank was tired of this guy's moronic BS. So what does any rational, sane person do? He floods the channel with as many acronyms as he can. Frank Started off with "OMG WTF BBQ DSL TNT BBC CNN CBS PCP RNR PBS NBA NFL..." and everyone else followed suit. The whole channel just spouted off every three letter acronym they could think of. The idiot got the hint and logged off.

And that's where OMGWTFBBQ comes from. True, utterly boring, story.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Irish_Samurai]

Learn how to search properly then. I guess you didn't RTFM. Here's how to remove the two of the larger blogs from your search:

SEARCH TERM(S) -inurl:www.livejournal.com -inurl:*.blogspot.com

That will remove results from Live Journal and Blogspot. Keep adding -URL:blogURL to get rid of more blogs. Learn More Here. [google.com]

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[JimRay]

The FAQ says "If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service" (emphasis mine) -- I assume Google's blog index is going to separate the news sites from the blogs with that AND qualifier. I can't think of any news sites that ping an updating service, so this should take care of that issue. Pretty clever, actually.

Using "-blog"

[Otto]

Even better would be if Google added "-blog" as a search option.

Actually, using -blog is reasonably effective at removing blogspam from search results. Adding that term to your search will simply exclude any results that contain the word "blog" on them, which most blogs usually have on the page somewhere.

Okay, it's not 100%, but it's pretty good nonetheless.