Google To Create "Blog" Search; Potentially Remove From Main

Skyshadow writes "Google, search engine of choice for pretty much everyone, has announced that it will begin a seperate index for blogs and remove them from the normal index, handling them instead in much the same way as their usenet archives. This will hopefully put an end to the recent difficulties locating primary source material among the mountains of blogs which are clogging the ratings system." There's been comments from elsewhere that says they won't be removing them - but that remains to be seen.

Comments

blogs.google.com?

[fewnorms]

Thing is, some of these blogs actually contain some pretty handy info from time to time, as blogs are becoming more and more used as a cheap and easy alternative to a content management system imho ....

Yes! But will there be a metasearch?

[DeHar]

This is a great idea, especially since many issues have much more commentary than source content. I love the quote "But what happens when the weblog fad dies down?"

However, I hope they maintain links between the main search and the blog search. Finding primary sources, then a button linking to all blog comments on theis topic would be a great research tool.

Personally..

[xchino]

I've found some of the best information on blogs. I have no problem with them making a blog specific search, but like the Linux specific search I hope relevant sites can still be found from the main search. It would be a pain to have to search every individual google engine for one bit of info. As it is now, I can use the main search and be pretty sure that I'm going to get a relevant result regardless of what category the site falls under. If I'm looking up what IIRC stands for, I don't really care if I get the info from a JoeBlow's blog or from howstuffworks.com.

Re:'Bout time

[arvindn]

what constitutes a 'blog'?

I was wondering about that too. Its not black and white, of course, especially when you want to automate it. I can think of several indications that a page is a blog, some weighted linear combination of these factors should work well enough in practice if you spend some time tweaking the weights:

• Updated frequently
• Keywords like "blog", "weblog", "posted by", "comments", "permanent link", and so on.
• Got dates all over the place
• Is hosted on one of the popular blogging sites (blogspot, lj, /. journals...)
• Links to and is linked from other weblogs.

This last factor is important. If you start from a rough heuristic and execute an iterative algorithm, similar to how they calculate pagerank, your blog detection algorithm will get better.

Blogs removed from google = FUD

[lysurgon]

There's no indication whether or not blogs will be left in or out of search results. This is very different from USENET, which was never part of the web in the first place. Orlowski is far from an unbiased source on this, having published many articles critical of bloggers in general. While two source are cited which are critical of the effect that blogs have had on the google ranking algorythm, none are cited which show the contributions personal publishers have made to the info-sphere.

Far more authoratative sources that I have already weighed in on this.

While there's certainly a lot of innane content available in blog form, this isn't really any different than it was before. I have never had to wade through 500 pages of results to find an original source either. The whole thing reeks of FUD to me Methinks that Orlowski and Roddy have their own axes to grind.

They should separate mailing list archives first

[Anonymous Coward]

If they really want to make their search engine useful, they ought to separate out Web archives of mailing list discussions. Blogs usually link back to where they got the story, so with only a little digging, you can find the original material. Mailing list discussions, though, are often out of date, irrelevant, and lacking in easy-to-follow references. They annoy me much more when I'm looking for things on the Web.

Re:'Bout time

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, am happy of searching material only to find that the page is some asshat's blog...

because what is important, in my point of view, is to GET THE ANSWER to what I'm looking for.

And if the answer is in a weblog that belongs to "Linux-freaks.Adhzerbahidjan", it still is the answer I'm looking for...

I mean things like "Proftpd doesn't seem to accept fxp connections", why the hell is this part of my distro not working as I wish...can only be proposed by people having the same problem and discussing it in a blog.

Another reason I prefer Weblogs to, say, IRC is that I don't have to humiliate myself asking "basic" questions to the 15 year old Guru that is nicknamed "EvilRootBeer" , I just have to parse a few blogs and get my answer without ANY fine manual to read.

"Nothing against blogs, but you never know where this material came from." Because you KNOW where the news from CNN is coming from ? I mean, they show proof and research material everytime they air a show, or a major groundbreaking news ("Mass destruction weapons found in Irak","Terrorist Bretzel Fails Coup d'Etat"..."

at least with blogs and the net, you can try and cross check the data, whereas with tv, you usualy only gulp some more mountain dew.

I just wish you had to find you Linux docs using the manuals provided on the distro and absolutly no other acees to raw data...