Saturday, September 17, 2005

A Look at Google Blog Search

Google has released a beta version of Google Blog Search, which it promises will do a better job of searching blogs than Google; it will be more precise than the main search engine in finding items posted on blogs. I have noticed in the past when searching for a specific review that I had posted that regular Google sometimes pointed me to a later review that had the wanted review as a previous postings link on the left side of the blog page. In some cases Google only pointed to my reviews in the monthly archive instead of the individual postings.

I have taken a quick look at Google Blog Search, comparing the results with my postings list in Blogger, which is also owned by Google. Only one of my last 50 postings is missing. Every entry is an individual post; I do not see the archive. Nothing posted before April 27 is represented.

Searchers can have their results list sorted two ways – by relevance or by date. By relevance brought all my postings including photos to the top. Do photos have more weight in Google’s algorithm?

Google Blog Search looks a lot like Google, so people will probably find it easy to use. Results can be updated as Atom or RSS feeds.

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