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Google Blog Search - Blah.

September 14, 2005

There was a quiver in the blogosphere this morning, and all of a sudden I’m seeing a bunch of articles on Google Blog Search.

I just can’t figure out why.

Maybe I just don’t get it, but I’m having difficulty figuring out the actual utility of this thing.

I did a couple of dozen searches on topics that I’ve been looking into lately, and for most of them, the majority of results on the first 3 - 4 pages fell into one of two categories:

  • Scraper/Spam Blogs — the pests out there that scrape search engine results, other people’s RSS feeds, etc. and remix them into strongly keyworded word salad to suck up search engine traffic and send it to contextual advertisers. These are leavened with a healthy handful of the “blog and ping” crowd that auto-spam a Blogger-blog with fake links to their real sites to try to get some link pop.
  • Commercial Feeds — Full-on commercial sites that have RSS feeds on product reviews and forums. Not a problem in and of itself, but in the main search results these appear intermixed with non RSS feed sites, and don’t end up with page after page of results from the same site.

Obviously this isn’t so much a blog-search as it is an RSS-centric search; maybe it’d be better to infuse the main results with a little more RSS goodness instead of doing this, however.

Perhaps it was just the search terms I was using, but if these are typical results, then this thing is going to have some real limited utility.

I know this is just a beta (like that term means much for Google, home of the lifetime beta features), but to make this useful they’ve got to find some way to weight the results better, and filter out a lot of the scraper/spammer BS.

Of course, a lot of the latter would go away if they just didn’t return results from their own blog hosting service… :-)

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Written by User ImageChuck Lawson · Filed Under Tech 
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