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Google Businesses The Internet

Google's Blog Search 306

Posted by CmdrTaco from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
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."
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Google's Blog Search More

Google's Blog Search

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  • Well, it does work. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Willeh ( 768540 ) * <rwillem@xs4all.nl> on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @08:55AM (#13556206)
    A search for "Angst" gives me 144,844 hits. Thanks, Google Blogsearch!

  • For the love of $DEITY (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kote-men-do ( 881870 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @08:56AM (#13556211)
    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)?

    • Re:For the love of $DEITY (Score:5, Informative)

      by nuclear305 ( 674185 ) * on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:09AM (#13556304)
      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'
      • From a webmaster perspective it's not as easy as you would think to keep sites (such as blogs) out of google's index.

        I think it could be done. Let the normal database and blog database be mutually exclusive. Tell the bloggers that they have to put a special line in their robots.txt to get into the blogging database. Once they're in, remove them from the normal web database. The sheep-like mentality of the blogging community would save us. Once a mildly famous blogger does it, the rest will fol

      • Re:For the love of $DEITY (Score:5, Funny)

        by Threni ( 635302 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:19AM (#13556388)
        > From a webmaster perspective it's not as easy as you would think to keep sites > (such as blogs) out of google's index

        "Report this blog" link?
      • Google sporatically and alternately pays attention to and ignores robot.txt files. I just tried their blog search and of course my blog is being indexed by google even though I've the spiders piss-off settings active on it.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:16AM (#13556366)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:For the love of $DEITY (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:23AM (#13556428) Homepage
        Blogs have been misused to inflate certain search results, both by commercial and political entities. For instance, do a Google search on "failure" and look at what pops up first.

        • Re:For the love of $DEITY (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @10:12AM (#13556874) Journal
          Those aren't "blogs", those are "search engine spam". "Removing blogs" ain't gonna do squat about that problem. Shall we remove all consumer product review sites because there is spam that looks like consumer product review sites?

          (A typical human fallacy; "this argument happens to result in something I agree with, therefore it must be correct", even if it's complete and utter nonsense if actually examined.)
          • a few weeks ago, a search for "DOC" resulted in some annoying blog at the top of the results.

            today, that same search puts the U.S. Department of Commerce and the New Zealand Department of Conservation at the top.

            likewise, a search for "Lawrence" had some blog at the top, and today we get Lawrence University, the Lawrence, KS newspaper, and the Lawrence Livermore laboratories.

            the blogs still do show up on the front page, so clearly google's search algorithm needs more tuning -- but we are winning the battle.

            • Those aren't "blogs", those are "search engine spam". "Removing blogs" ain't gonna do squat about that problem. Shall we remove all consumer product review sites because there is spam that looks like consumer product review sites?

              (I don't get to do this often.... most people aren't as oblivious to what other people are saying.)
      • "ffs I hate java multithreading..."

        "java multithreading is such a piece of shit..."

        "today my cat mewed three times in a row! and by the way... that java multithreading is hot! like my girlfriend.. today, she..."

        yeahhhh... blogs.

        Sure, there's *useful* blogs out there. But you're far more likely to find the info you need on a proper resources page.

        And if for some reason you really can't find what you need in a regular search - do the blog search and find all of the above.. and maybe, just maybe, whatever info
      • Exactly. Personal blogs have been one of the best sources of real information on hurricane Katrina over the past few weeks. Want some worthwhile info about anywhere besides New Orleans' CBD or the French Quarter? The only people who were in many parts of the affected areas were every day citizens, and blogs are how everyday citizens publish on the web.

        Like you said, a well thought out set of search terms usually isn't run over with random blogs for me. My weblog gets a the occasional random google search hi
      • Why would you want to discount search results just because they happen to be on blogs? That strikes me as cutting off your nose to spite your face.

        Because my company's filewall blocks access to 99% of blogging sites and those links are useless to me for doing exactly the kind of professional research you mention. I know you'll just want to indict me now for choosing to work at so draconian a company, but that's just how it is and I'd love to be able to exclude those sites.

        Luckily, sometimes the "cached

    • Re:For the love of $DEITY (Score:5, Insightful)

      by a16 ( 783096 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:21AM (#13556408)
      How do you define exactly what a blog is? I'd love to see "Bob's whining about life" containing 3,625 pages of rambling to be excluded from the index, but at the same time there is a huge amount of useful information on blogs. I know whenever I have a complex technical issue, say a Linux problem, pasting the full error message into Google will often find me a result in some guys blog who had the exact same issue and details how to resolve it. I'd hate to see that kind of valuable information not be in the main index.

      Come to think of it, I can't really think of that many times when I've had to say "Damn, there are too many blog entries in these results". If you know how to search, you're only going to see blogs when they contain info that you might want anyway.

      • So, search both the web and the blogsearch. There's an awful lot of useful information in the Google/Deja Usenet archive, but there's no clamour for those things to be included in the main search, because if you want that, all you have to do is click the appropriate word.

        Is that really so difficult?
        • Well answered, although it requires a further two clicks and then to type out the whole shebang again to get to the Blog search.
          Terrible. ;-)
        • Difficult, no, but I'd still like to see a "Search Everything" tab so that I don't have to repeat the same search for the Web, Usenet and now Blogs. Probably not overly useful for "day to day" searches, but for something more techical it'd be handy.
    • I'd like them to exclude pages that are nothing but results from other pages...arggg...how do these get any ranking??
  • Google or M$ will more then likely just buy Technorati.

  • What exactly is a "blog" these days? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @08:59AM (#13556231)
    What is considered a "blog" these days? I can understand a personal journal of some 13-year-old angsty kid being considered a "blog". But is Slashdot considered a "blog"? Is the news listing [borland.co.uk] on Borland's site considered a "blog"?

    It seems that any page that is updated frequently with entries of some sort is considered a "blog". And that ends up being a vast majority of pages. Perhaps the downfall of this service is that what it is supposed to be searching is not very well defined. One cannot do exact searches when the search medium is so undefined.

  • Whoa, and it's not a beta!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:01AM (#13556239)
    ... OK, just kidding ;-)

  • Blog Spam (Score:2, Informative)

    by elkyle ( 875715 )
    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.

  • Excellent (Score:5, Funny)

    by CleverNickedName ( 644160 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:02AM (#13556249) Journal
    It does seem to give an excellent insight into the blog communities.

    Search for: "interesting and well constructed points of view" [google.com]
    --- 0 Results found

    Search for: "whining" [google.com]
    --- 99,051 Results found

  • So will now..... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by amodm ( 876842 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:02AM (#13556250)
    governments use this to figure out which bloggers of their country are violating regulations ?

    PS: Not referring to singapore case in particular.

  • Now all they need to do (Score:5, Insightful)

    by seanyboy ( 587819 ) * on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:03AM (#13556260)
    Is place link farms on a separate search page.
    Then Google search will be useful again.
    • It happens more and more that i search for a few words and the first google link pages don't countain those words. More, the google cache doesn't countain them either.
      So my bet is that they also have problems that are related to their search engine, and NOT to outside sites.
      It's always the blogers fault, or the commercial sites fault, or the webmasters faults etc etc, but shouldnt google get its fair share of criticisms?

      Link farms should be banned. period. If they exist, it's because google don't ban them.

  • As far as privacy goes... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bloodgroove ( 675506 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:05AM (#13556274)
    I'm not concerned. Blogs by nature have pubic and private settings so that's taken care of. The contract with a blog means that the data is public unless otherwise noted, so if you're worried, you protect it. Despite the number of personal blogs out there, the google blog search will likely have it's hits focused on things like political and technical blogs rather than blogs about what Suzy did last night. Likely, most of these authors want their views and opinions public. If you don't want people to see your dirty laundry, keep it in the hamper.
    • An AC has already said this, but just to reiterate - it's ignoring the "Block robots/spiders" option on Livejournal accounts. I don't mind my LJ being out there - it wouldn't be on the net otherwise, but it's generally considered polite to observe robots.txt and friends. I have a more public blog for the profound (!) stuff, and the drivel-which-only-friends-cares-about goes on LJ so it's kept seperate and doesn't get indexed.

      If it was, say, MSN Search making this screwup rather than Google, all hell would b
  • Why would they have nightmares about a blog search? Just replace your own search box with a powered by Google box, and keep the rest of the site. They do have a few more features than just a search function.

  • Keysearch (Score:3, Funny)

    by WebfishUK ( 249858 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:14AM (#13556348)
    Yeah, yeah, yeah, but when will they do something really useful like keysearch. I never loose my blog, but I'm forever misplacing my keys!

  • comics are blogs now? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by potaz ( 211754 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:16AM (#13556361) Homepage
    Yeah, it's weird what's being considered a blog. My comic ( http://www.qwantz.com/ [qwantz.com] ) is listed, and I would be the first to argue that there is a difference between a daily comic and a weblog.

    I think what people would want more is a way to exclude blogs from regular Google searches - is this an option?
    • I quite agree. For a start, your comic consistantly makes me laugh, whereas blogs tend to make me want to beat my head in with my mouse.
    • Oh, so you do a "blomic"!
    • (a) Whoa, hey, Ryan. Reader here. What is up?

      I think what people would want more is a way to exclude blogs from regular Google searches - is this an option?

      (b) Actually, when are they going to index Livejournal and make it searchable? It doesn't have to be part of the main page -- I understand if you don't wanna search livejournal, but I do. You could do it via the calendar pages, but searches for things on livejouranl are currently really impractical. It sucks that the only way for me to search even m

    • Re:comics are blogs now? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Angst Badger ( 8636 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @10:58AM (#13557277)
      Your comic -- which is fucking hilarious, BTW -- would have completely escaped my attention if you had not bitched about its categorization as a blog on Slashdot. There are two reasons for this:

      1. I am reasonably certain, even if I lived to be a hundred years old, I would never have typed "dinosaur search" into Google.

      2. I am equally certain that I will never use a blog-specific search tool. If I want to search blogs, I'll just use the main Google interface with a search key like "noise -signal".

      The lesson to learn here, of course, is to forget about your Google search ranking and engage in shameless plugging on Slashdot.

  • Out of Ideas (Score:3, Insightful)

    by KrisCowboy ( 776288 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:17AM (#13556375) Journal
    I'm totally drained out about thinking what would be the next damn thing to come out of the Google house. What else can a human being possibly do with the internet?
    • What about video? I know they have http://video.google.com/ [google.com], but I'd like them to put it on the front page along with "Web", "Images", "Groups", "News" and so on.

      What I think will happen is that Google will break into more specific searches like cronyism, nepotism, corruption and the like especially in governments around the world.

      Cronyism is especially why the former FEMA boss did not perform. The trouble is that this is happening in America and could still happen again. Those in the 3rd world must be b

  • Not yet; from the FAQ:

    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.

    Surely they're interested in my clunky little scripts [blogs.com]...

  • Works well. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CABAN ( 818466 ) <adelleda.gmail@com> on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:20AM (#13556392)
    This new system works well and really shows the full potential of blogs.

    I did a search for my hometown, London, Ontario to see who is blogging.
    http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=lo ndon+ontario&btnG=Search+Blogs [google.com].

    7 out of 10 were scraper sites built for adsense.

    Looks like this great new search tool will make them money in the long run.

    • Re:Works well. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by thenetbox ( 809459 )
      Hopefully they'll be fixing that some how. That would be in the interest of their adword advertisers and therefore in googles interest. When people see more of these ads on useless empty sites they would be more blinded by them and not click.

  • Well, that explains things. (Score:5, Funny)

    by RamonetB ( 821380 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:22AM (#13556415)
    "Sane"
    130,249 results.

    "Insane"
    482,040 results.

    There's a research paper in here somewhere, I know it!
  • (politics republican bush katrina democrat judges supreme court football baseball Red Sox Patriots basketball mortgage loan money porn $(SEARCH TERM)).

    Today Jimmy and I (Jimmy's my hamster, he likes to use his exercise wheel) watched cartoons in the morning. Jimmy's so cute! He likes to nibble on my finger, he thinks it's his water spout.

    $(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)$(SEARCH TERM)

    How's my blog pagerank?

  • google search extra line (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Errtu76 ( 776778 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:23AM (#13556425) Journal
    when i google (the normal one, not blog) for "Technorati", ofcourse the first hit is their homepage, but under the search results i see an extra line:

    Top 100 Blogs - About - Developers - Blog

    Nice. Didn't notice that before. Is this also new?
  • Well, they're certainly good at STARTING these ambitious projects. Will they ever actually FINISH one?

    -Eric (who has been using "Google Groups Beta" for 4 years now)

  • Cool, site search works! (Score:3, Informative)

    by bad_outlook ( 868902 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:51AM (#13556655) Homepage
    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)
  • 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 i
  • Is it just me or does slashdot look more and more like a Google press release page?
  • I blogged about this last night... [feedblog.org]

    Very interesting first implementation. Light feature set but still pretty cool. Expect Yahoo to follow up. Would have been nice to see them deliver this sooner.
  • Phentermine. [google.com]
    Viagra. [google.com]
    Personal Injury Lawyer. [google.com]
    Texas Holdem Poker. [google.com]

    Well, it's just as good as Google's subsidiary [blogger.com] at filtering out weblog spam.

  • wow (Score:2)

    by loconet ( 415875 )
    They are either manually categorizing some of these blogs or their algorithm does a pretty good job at detecting the type of content.

    Out of curiosity I typed my nickname "loconet" and it pulled up related posts on my blog with the related blogs area describing my little blog as:

    "geek insight"

    ha! I am proud to be labeled as a geek with insight to say the least..although I'm not sure about the latter part.

  • hairloss.info--yeah right! (Score:3, Funny)

    by rjnagle ( 122374 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @10:18AM (#13556918) Homepage
    I searched for my alias/weblog idiotprogrammer.

    Number one search result is hairlossworld.info

    Way to go google!
  • I think this is important because it means that Google is beginning to differentiate between blogs and other internet content. Now that they have divided it internally, perhaps they could assign a lower weight to blog material in a normal web search, so that searches are completely cluttered with blog noise.

    On a side note, this is proof that competition between Google and MSN is improving them both - Microsoft has had a blog search attached to start.com for a number of months now. At the moment, I still

  • wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by hyperstation ( 185147 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @10:38AM (#13557090)
    it's like indexing a litter box, turd by turd.
  • Ever noticed the additional Google links (download, support, support, screenshots, ...), when you enter something like Abiword, Firefox, OpenOffice, KDE, ...? Nice feature.
  • Google Blog Search already found blog posts from a person who applied for, accepted, and started a job at the competition. Complete with starting salary and a description of their duties.

    Now to subscribe to the Google Blog Search results RSS feed for my search term, and wait for the inevitable, "I got fired!" post. Google Blog Search truly is informative and entertaining.

  • Updating indexes? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rincebrain ( 776480 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @11:34AM (#13557600) Homepage
    I was curious about this service's updating policy, so I ran a simple search.

    One of my friends has an omg lol emo account on LiveJournal, and a few months ago, they went on an omg friends only spree, protecting almost all of their entries.

    I searched for their username on Google Blog Search, and it linked their blog - unsurprising. What was surprising was that it also linked to all of the protected entries that I could think of, even those that are currently inaccessable, should you click the links to the pages.

    What concerns me about this is whether Google will ever clean its index of these results...admittedly, it will be entertaining if they do not, but when you or someone you care about does something stupid, like accidentally posting that e-mail that their boss sent around with the contact information intact publicly, then realizes their mistake and removes it, how long after that will Google retain the data?

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