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."

Comments

Well, it does work.

[Willeh]

A search for "Angst" gives me 144,844 hits. Thanks, Google Blogsearch!

Re:Well, it does work.

[porkThreeWays]

254,761 results for "emo" ;)

Re:Well, it does work.

[birder]

Emo gives 254,761. Hopefully one of the links explains what the hell that actually means.

Re:Well, it does work.

[databyss]

There is something wrong when "OMGWTFBBQLOL" gives me results.... 41 to be exact

Re:Well, it does work.

[gehel]

Wow, I almost read the result was 42, which would explain a lot ...
I still dont know the great question, and it doesnt seem that Google will help me to find it ...

Re:Well, it does work.

[madprof]

Where does this originate from?

Re:Well, it does work.

[passion]

I get 18,874 results for 'cat vomit | puked | threw-up'.

Re:Well, it does work.

[AKAImBatman]

I just search for "AKAImBatman", and I got 19 results; most from this blog "The Man Also Known as 'I'm Batman'"! Whoo hoo! I'm famous!

...

Err... wait a moment...

Re:Well, it does work.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard of this "puke daemon", but I don't think it should be used interactively like that.

Re:Well, it does work.

[farker haiku]

I believe that this originates from Fark. Or possibly TotalFark. Or maybe, it comes from UltraFar...

Re:Well, it does work.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://emo.urbanup.com/150125

Re:Well, it does work.

[noidentity]

"There is something wrong when "OMGWTFBBQLOL" gives me results.... 41 to be exact "

And now 43.

Re:Well, it does work.

[joshdick]

Flying Spaghetti Monster yields 4,999 hits. All hail His Noodleness.

Re:Well, it does work.

[eexlebots]

How about SomethingAwful making fun of Fark?

Re:Well, it does work.

[Orionetheus]

Crap. Now anyone can search for your name and find you online. If you have a blog with private thoughts you dont want your friends and family seeing (but dont mind if complete strangers see them) it just got easier to find...

Re:Well, it does work.

[Anonymous Coward]

624 defintions and no two alike.

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:Well, it does work.

[jiushao]

Something Awful. OMGWTFBBQ is the nick of an administrator on the SA forums (he has also run some frontpage features at one time or other). No doubt the general "idea" is not unique, but these particular variations are with very little doubt directly due to his nickname.

He is apparently more than a bit annoyed with having his name turn into an overused catchphrase.

Re:Well, it does work.

[the_xaqster]

60,676 Results for Drama Queen....

Re:Well, it does work.

[RTSKABJ]

I searched to confirm, and on page 2 there's already a Live Journal entry confirming it: "Where OMGWTFBBQLOL gives you 41 relevent results, and most of them are from livejournal :p" http://www.livejournal.com/users/waywardpixie/1543 72.html ALL OF THIS KNOWLEDGE AT MY FINGER TIPS!

Re:Well, it does work.

[trekstar25]

I doubt many of these blogs weren't indexed before. It's just a specific subset of the main Google search.

Sorry, buddy, I'm afraid your mom already knows about your balloon animal fetish (is that even a furry?).

Re:Well, it does work.

[databyss]

Now it is 42!

Re:Well, it does work.

[iamlucky13]

I search google blog search for "blog" (ooohhh, recursion. He must be a hax0r) and I got 3,747,283 hits. To save everybody else on slashdot the trouble, here's some others that I know you will try.

Princess - 504,636
Podcast - 108,447
Photoblog - 47,412
Iraq - 645,658
nucular - 958

And of course, coming in surprisingly low "Paris Hilton" got 72,274 results.

Re:Well, it does work.

[Sheriff of Rockridge]

What is 6 x 9?

Re:Well, it does work.

[bluelip]

I found some little girl using my name!!! Where's the DMCA when you need it?

didn't she google beforehand to see if it was in use?!?! :)

Re:Well, it does work.

[hachete]

Is that, like, LOL, Bloggerdom is the new AOL? OMG. ROFL.

Re:Well, it does work.

[Hurricane78]

And now it's 43, and i will never see the answer again, you insensible clod!

Re:Well, it does work.

[gehel]

Well, the problem was to know the question ... I already had the answer ...
Well, it took million of years to compute it, so it's probably normal that Google cant get it in a few seconds ...

Re:Well, it does work.

[Tibe]

Results 1 - 10 of about 7,650,000 for "emo". (0.35 seconds)

Is the index growing really fast?

Re:Well, it does work.

[Tibe]

Uh, I mean

Results 1-10 of about 459,942 for 'emo' (0.34 seconds)

Is the index growing really fast?

Re:Well, it does work.

[Omnieiunium]

Praise fellow pastafarian. That is what I tried first.

I checked it out, but I am not that impressed. It could be better.

Re:Well, it does work.

[ComputerSherpa]

It was bound to happen sooner or later, and services of this sort have existed up to this point. If you want your blog to remain anonymous/private, you probably shouldn't mention your name.

Re:Well, it does work.

[meonkeys]

If what you say is true, the definition on wikipedia is incorrect. -- Adam Monsen http://adammonsen.com/blog/

For the love of $DEITY

[kote-men-do]

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

[markpapadakis]

Google services get added to the tabs list once they are considered mature enough (either out of beta or too long in beta to be considered 'stable', whatever that may mean to them ).

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'

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Stephen Williams]

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.

Sure, we all know that a large proportion of blogs are worthless. But if you do a search for, say, "java multithreading", you'll get a load of relevant results from blogs and non-blogs alike. The worthless "omg my bf is cheeting on me what am i going to do lol" type blogs contain no entries related to the search terms, so they won't appear in the results, and you won't have to read them.

Like the rest of the Web, some blogs are interesting and informative, some aren't.

-Stephen

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[sevensharpnine]

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 follow. Or, better yet, we could just get one of those idiots to walk off a cliff...

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Threni]

> 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?

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Anonymous Coward]

$ echo $DEITY
Shiva
$

Hmmm, who would have thought.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[a16]

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.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[TheSHAD0W]

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

[Animaether]

"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 you were looking for.

Really, your argument would hold just as well for online marketers, etc. Why would you want to exclude the hundreds of websites that merely offer referral links ? after all, those websites may very well be relevant to what you're looking for %)

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[mdwh2]

I doubt it, because this would mean removing any website which had an Atom or RSS feed. Well, to be sure it's not entirely clear how Google decide to count something as a "blog", whether they go solely by the presence of a feed or not.

But it would be annoying to have to search twice, just because you weren't sure whether what you were looking for was counted as a "blog" or not.

Slashdot for example would be excluded (yes, Google count Slashdot as a "blog", no matter how many people claim it isn't, since it has an RSS feed). Great if you don't want to stumble across whiney troll comments, not so great if a Slashdot article contains what you are looking for.

Also, the problem of blog threads cluttering up search results also occurs with webforum posts being included - but these tend not to have a feed, so this wouldn't solve the problem.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[cowscows]

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 hit, but it's usually for something incredibly dumb. My personal favorite was "I'm not black and I can't get down". I don't really know why my page was listed under that.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[b100dian]

Please let this mean that blogs are now excluded from the main google search?
That would be cool, considering that 99.(9)% of blogs use some recognizable publishing script.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[teslatug]

I'd like them to exclude pages that are nothing but results from other pages...arggg...how do these get any ranking??

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[$RANDOMLUSER]

If you check the source:

if [ -f ~/.DEITY ] ; then
. ~/.DEITY
fi

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[sketerpot]

Or you could just get the authors of popular weblog software on board.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Stephen Williams]

"zomg it's the java multithreading meme!!! ask me 3 questions about java multithreading, and then post this meme in your own lj!!!111one"

Really, your argument would hold just as well for online marketers, etc. Why would you want to exclude the hundreds of websites that merely offer referral links ? after all, those websites may very well be relevant to what you're looking for %)

I've seen more worthwhile stuff on blogs than on referral sites, but you do raise a valid point regarding the kinds of blogs that just link to other articles without containing any actual useful content themselves.

-Stephen

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[gowen]

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?

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Threni]

> Exactly. Personal blogs have been one of the best sources of real information
> on hurricane Katrina over the past few weeks

Apart from news sites, you mean?

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Gherald]

For us agnostics, that should read:

if [ -r ~/.DEITY ] ; then
    . ~/.DEITY
fi

I have a ~/.DEITY file, but it's not readable ;)

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[LiquidCoooled]

YES

This is absolutely key to a good search.

I couldn't care less if I get ramblings from a mad man as long as its on topic, but the absolute worst is the totally useless spam pages.

It is getting worse, and sometimes no matter how much google-foo exists they still crop up.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[madprof]

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. ;-)

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[-brazil-]

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.

I've had that experience quite a few times when looking for quotable information, especially about politically charged topics. With technical issues, you can try out a proposed solution and see if it works. But political articels in blogs tend to be partisan, full of spin and distorted of facts. Quoted sources are usually other blogs.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[-brazil-]

Not difficult, but it's still an additional step that many people probably never do (because they don't know about Usenet or forget about it), thereby missing potentially valuable information.

And what exactly is the ADVANTAGE of separating the indexes? I can't think of any.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[cowscows]

No, news sites mostly sucked. A couple of the local ones were decent. WWLtv.com was pretty good, especially their forums(everyday people), and NOLA.com's forums were ok too. Of course, the traffic to them was heavy as all hell at times, which made it harder to deal with.

All of the big news sites were much more interested in sharing emotion than information. It took me days to find out anything about Harahan, where I live, and that's just a few minutes west of the city. And when I did, it wasn't from MSNBC, or a local news reporter. The info got out from people making cell phone calls to friends/family, and then those people posting information.

If you wanted to know what President Bush or Michael Brown was doing, you checked CNN.com. If you wanted to know whether or not your neighborhood flooded, you had to look a little futher.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Norgus]

I don't quite see how much of a hardship to you it would be to move blogs out of the main index into their own index.

maybe google personal search could be made to search all the sections of google you are interested from the main page anyway.

Better seperation and marking of different types of indexed data can only be a good thing.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[maharg]

absolutely. according to that logic, BBC News Online is a blog.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Jerf]

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.)

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Gr8Apes]

Because blogs are personal opinions, usually, and if I want to include a search of the masses, I'd add blogs as part of what needed to be searched. It should be optional. If I'm looking for some specific documentation under Jakarta Commons, a google search will find it quite quickly. If I also have to pore through blog results.... Bleah.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[TobascoKid]

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.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[mdwh2]

Because blogs are personal opinions, usually

And non-blogs aren't personal opinions, and are objective and factually accurate?

What is Google anyway, if not a search of "the masses".

It seems like you want some magical ticky box "Don't include personal opinions"...

If I'm looking for some specific documentation under Jakarta Commons, a google search will find it quite quickly. If I also have to pore through blog results

If irrelevant blog posts come up higher in the rankings than an official page, then Google's search algorithm needs improving.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[croddy]

actually, it's a bit more like shoveling dog poop out of the oven to save your roast.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[croddy]

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.

bloggers are a group who openly and aggressively play games with google's site ranking algorithms in order to push their personal home pages to the front of the list for terms that people just aren't using to refer to them. it should come as no surprise that their annoying link-spamming will be countered as aggressively.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[stlhawkeye]

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" version is helpful.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Jerf]

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.)

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[kfg]

. . .we could just get one of those idiots to walk off a cliff...

Doesn't work. The followers just walk to the edge of the cliff and then talk about walking off, ad infinitum.

See Kurt Cobain and the top post.

KFG

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[prgrmr]

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.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Spolster]

If you wanted to know whether or not your neighborhood flooded, you had to look a little futher.
Like out the window?

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[croddy]

are you even listening?

from the perspective of most web users, BLOGGERS ARE SPAMMERS. normal bloggers, with what appears to be human-authored (if useless) content -- yes. THAT'S SPAM because it abuses hyperlinking to artificially inflate search engine rankings.

we're not saying that sites full of viagra ads need to go. we're saying that doc searls and others with a million lines of drivel a week ARE SPAM and NEED TO GO.

the proportion of people who read this crap is astoundingly small, and you need to be penned in to an area of the web where we don't have to see you, and we don't have to hear you.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Anonymous Coward]

"I do not like this content, therefore I do not want this content to exist."

Are you a cocksucker in all respects, or just on this one particular issue?

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Irish_Samurai]

There is one little problem with this perspective, not everyone searching for a term is searching for the same thing you are. When someone searches for an acronym, there are multiple possible results that could be returned. If those results are not what your looking for, that doesn't always mean that you were right and the search algo was wrong. Nor does it neccesarily mean that spammers have manipulated the rankings. Alot of the time, your search was flawed because of input. To point:

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.

What if I was looking for Lawrence Fishburn? I don't see that at the top, so Lawrence University must have manipulated the rankings!

a few weeks ago, a search for "DOC" resulted in some annoying blog at the top of the results.

What if I wanted to know about the .DOC file extention, but I didn't know I should use the '.' in front?

It is popular opinion here to denounce any broad unfocused search that didn't return the desired results as manipulated by SEO or Spammers, and that is ridiculous. Google rotates its caches, data centers, and algos now. It is very difficult to game them under these new conditions. You say "we are winning the battle", that shit is ridiculous. If it's the battle against OBVIOUS spam, then I'm with you. But please quit thinking that your search perspective is the end all be all of how the rest of the world should search google. How about learning to use advanced search operators? Or perhaps searching for the correct criteria? How about using the Scholar search if you are looking for data or papers?

Google is attempting to make every search return relevant results for everybody, that's pretty god damn hard. For the sake of relevancy, they have been breaking searches down by verticals to facilitate this, and the move to a blog search is a logical progression. This should alleviate the horrible "a blog showed up in my lamely defined search" problem. But please people, have some accountability and learn how to use the damn tool before you begin jumping on the popular Slashdot diatribe.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[cowscows]

I think you're just trying to be funny, but I case you were being serious:

No, fortunately for me, I had the resources to evacuate. My house did not get any flooding, and I can move back tomorrow. Woo!

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Seumas]

Why would you want to discount search results just because they happen to be on blogs?

For the same reason I don't read through everyone's diaries when I'm looking for reference books at the library.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[bheer]

> from the perspective of most web users, BLOGGERS ARE SPAMMERS

Rubbish. Blogs are often full of excellent content you won't find anyplace else. Daily Kos/Instapundit (take your poison). Tech blogs: Tim Bray, Sam Ruby as well as my current favorite: Derrick Coetzee. Journalists: go see Michael Yon does on his blog and wonder what a sad state journalism has come to today that none of the mainstream media can do what he does.

And oh, if by your so-very-high standards bloggers are /still/ spammers, then Slashdot should close down its comments, because what we seen here is unadulterated dreck compared to the content above. At least we'd get less incoherent idiots like you polluting the intarweb (Google indexes Slashdot comments too, after all).

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.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Q2Serpent]

If you want to be pedantic, you need more checks. You can't source what's not a file.

I have a ~/.DEITY directory full of gods :)

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[the_xaqster]

Congratulations. In just 3 posts slashdot has started a trend that will make any legitimate information on java multithreading impossibe to find amidst the "zomg!! java multithreading !11!!!1 LOLOLOLZZ!!111! " comedy posts we are going to have for the next 14 months...

What other search terms would you like to see trashed? Answers on a postcard (or the back of a stuck down envelope) to the ususal address please.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[ikkonoishi]

The trick is that you then blow up the cliff with C4.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[grammar fascist]

Learn how to search properly then.

That attitude will certainly win you some friends.

That will remove results from Live Journal and Blogspot. Keep adding -URL:blogURL to get rid of more blogs.

That's fine...until the list of domains gets so long I need to cut-and-paste it from a file every time I want non-blog results. Even better would be if Google added "-blog" as a search option. Presumably, they know where the blogs are, so they can keep them out of the results.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Irish_Samurai]

And what exactly is the ADVANTAGE of separating the indexes? I can't think of any.

It seems that BlogSearch can order results by date and relevancy. I assume that because of this that Google uses a rolling index for the blogs. That would be a friggin nightmare if done against the whole index. But IANA Search Engine Dev.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[ergo98]

bloggers are a group who openly and aggressively play games with google's site ranking algorithms in order to push their personal home pages to the front of the list for terms that people just aren't using to refer to them

You say this like bloggers are polluting the work of some sort of all-knowing illuminati - an illuminati that is trusted with the responsibility of all outgoing links, carefully and in an unbiased manner choosing their link wording and targets to best serve the search community and the workings of Google's algorithm and PageRank(TM). Such an ideal doesn't exist, and has never existed.

For time eternal, since the origins of the web, people have linked to their pet interests, quid pro quoing links or favouring friends (even amongst the big sites one can see seemingly meaningless links appearing to partners and friends, and you know it's such PageRank goodness). "Bloggers", a term which encompasses just about everyone in either fact or capability, are just playing the game that existed since search engines started counting links and considering them votes. Of course there are a lot of bloggers, and they tend to link other bloggers, so there has been a deflation in the value of individual links. You can read more about my thoughts on this on my super important best blog in the world (I joke with the link text, as Slashdot uses nofollow, so that should be meaningless to search engines).

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Irish_Samurai]

That attitude will certainly win you some friends.
Maybe not, but it is the truth. People need to quit whining when they should take a little more initiative in solving the problem themselves instead of bitching about it. Quite often this attitude does not result in making friends.

Even better would be if Google added "-blog" as a search option.
I'm currently in the process of writing an add on to the Google tool bar for Mozilla that will append these blog search operators to the text box on submit. It's going slow because I'm a web guy and my programming is a little less than stellar.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[arose]

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.

It's not 'some blog' it's the blog of Lawrence Lessig. And it's still the fourth result.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[bigpat]

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'm sorry could you provide a link. I've been wondering how Bob was doing.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[DaoudaW]

do a Google search on "failure" and look at what pops up first.

And your point is ... ?

Let's be serious. All that Google is doing is consolidating the opinion of thousands of websites and coming up with the obvious: for a lot of people our president epitomizes failure. Nobody hacked Google to get that result.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Arandir]

How would they know it's a blog? They might be able to filter out stuff from their own blogger, but that's about it. What distinguishes a blog from a news site? A blog from a recipe/review site? A blog from a software project homepage? A blog from a mailing list archive?

Not all blogs are amateur. Not all blogs are posting frequently. Not all blogs are hosted at blogging portals. Not all blogs have syndication. Not all blogs have comments.

How do you distinguish a blog from a non-blog? You can't because "blog" is a fuzzy concept that encompasses everything from Slashdot to Vodkapundit to Freshmeat to Richard Stallman's homepage.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Arandir]

But political articels in blogs tend to be partisan, full of spin and distorted of facts.

True, but unlike the Mainstream Media(tm), at least they don't pretend that they're objective journalists while doing it.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Anonymous Coward]

that would in fact make it "some blog". please try to remember that it's pretty much only bloggers who buy into the blogging personality cults. the rest of the world still prefers to evaulate texts on their own merits, not the face in the sidebar.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[JhohannaVH]

Hehehehehe..... and look what comes up SECOND!!!!!!! YAY!

*snickering loudly*

Jho

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[iamlucky13]

There are a ton of ordinary blogs (mostly the worthless ones) that get spammed themselves by people trying to screw with search engine results. Rather than filling false blogs up with links to the site they want to promote, they go to legitimate blogs and fill the guestbooks/comments up with links.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[bahwi]

"abuses hyperlinking to artificially inflate search engine rankings."

And who's fault is this? You've obviously pointed out a flaw in the search engine algorithms, but not one in the bloggers. Maybe you mean "Google should go"?

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[arose]

that would in fact make it "some blog".

Not if "some blog" is used in a manner that implies that it is useless and irrelevant just because it's a blog.

please try to remember that it's pretty much only bloggers who buy into the blogging personality cults.

Please try to remember that bloggers are not all alike, aside from that I'm not actively involved in the blogging community.

the rest of the world still prefers to evaulate texts on their own merits, not the face in the sidebar.

The "rest of the world" is still the celebrity worshiping place it has been for decades. And someone who does "evaulate texts on their own merits" should care about capitalization (as it eases reading) and maybe even spelling.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Chrax]

They have a "Product search results..." link, one for Google Scholar, and one for images. Wouldn't it make sense to knock off the known blog sites (Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc.) from the main search and have a "Blog search results..." link?

I think the only problem is that if you remove blogs from the main Google search, you lose the linkage that they use to determine pagerank, and blogs have become a significant part of web culture. Though I suppose they could still use the links, even if they index the pages somewhere else.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[HorsePunchKid]

Thank God! I'm not the only one who wants a "no blogs" option from Google, apparently. Blogs have been creeping into results for a few years now, and it's gotten to the point where some searches are just flooded by blogs linking back and forth to each other.

The problem is that it then can be very difficult to figure out where the information originally came from. For the things I search for (programming references, various science topics, etc.), the primary source is usually not a blog, so I could get by quite well with no blog results in my searches.

If I want commentary on my search results, I can hop over to Blog Search.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Anonymous Coward]

Your shameless pimping on the warmonger Yon's blog sickens me. You are a fucking asshole. Please kill yourself and then blog about it.

Shithead.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[jZnat]

Other than Blogger or LiveJournal, what popular blog software would actually bother to add in anything that helps outside users? If they can't even add Tidy to their output (a somewhat trivial process), what makes you think they'd "waste time" to add a trivial line of code to help search indexes? They do provide their own searching (which normally requires signing up at that site to use).

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Snaller]

Except we don't have time for, nor do we want to, add dozen or hundres of sites to remove (nor is there space) each time we search.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[mdwh2]

: Why would you want to discount search results just because they happen to be on blogs?

For the same reason I don't read through everyone's diaries when I'm looking for reference books at the library.

Sure, but the problem is that short of some nifty AI, there's no way for Google to filter out the diaries.

At the moment, any kind of "don't include blogs" option is going to discount non-diary results that might be useful to what you are searching for, and still include lots of pointless forum-type posts from places that didn't get categorised as a "blog".

If you want "reference books" without the clutter of the rest of the Internet, perhaps a site like Wikipedia might be a better start than Google.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Seumas]

I want my search engine to be a search engine. I don't want it to be a place where I get all the nave-gazing self-validating crapfloods from the internet spammed onto my screen. There's nothing worse than looking for information about something specific only to find that the first handful of top results are all multiple websites pointing to each other because one had a link saying "I found this neat thing" and no actual fucking INFORMATIONZ about it.

I'd rather go back to the days of actual spam in my search results if it meant I could do away with the blogs.

Also, if you can make a search engine that is all for blog content, you can absolutely remove that content from the main search engine (since you've already identified it as blog stuff).

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[mdwh2]

Also, if you can make a search engine that is all for blog content, you can absolutely remove that content from the main search engine (since you've already identified it as blog stuff).

And how do Google count something as a "blog"?

By whether it has a feed. Since clearly, not all websites with feeds are diaries, and also not all diaries necessarily have feeds, removing the "blogs" will not achieve what you are after.

Slashdot is included in Blog Search - do you consider Slashdot to be empty of any information?

Google most certainly has not managed to create a search engine which can identify personal diary type blogs; people are just jumping to conclusions based on their interpretation of the word "blog".

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[xactuary]

Your point being?

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[pipingguy]

[quote] All of the big news sites were much more interested in sharing emotion than information. [/quote]

Comments below from http://www.torontosun.com/News/Katrina/2005/09/10/ 1210553-sun.html

As a culture we have come to revere feelings rather than thought.

We weep for people we see on television whom we have never met, but cannot name the person who lives three doors away and have no idea of their pain, needs and fears.

It's the same sensibilities behind the mass pilgrimages to spots where people have been murdered, as if this gives us a sense of meaning and inclusion. We vicariously feel the flame of fame.

The recent scenes of entire crowds of people weeping on the anniversary of the death of Princess Diana say it all, really.

One almost expected Celine Dion to step forward and sing a ballad in the woman's memory.

Not cynical but realistic. We're drinking neurosis from buckets offered by pop singers and television hosts.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[jseale]

It's still possible to search for blogs in the main Google GUI by typing 'blog: ' prior to your search query. Works pretty darn well for me anyway. This new site will not make such 'old-skool' means of searching for blogs any less popular. It's all a matter of preference. Technorati and it's brethren are just a bit too powerful for some people IMHO.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[bayvult]

Wake up and change the record. The poor of urban New Orleans were emphatically not blogging - because most of them can't afford computers - and oops! forgot to take them to the toxic Superdome.

... " and blogs are how everyday citizens publish on the web."

No, it's how everyday white suburban college-educated professionals publish on the web.

This time it was the professional broadcast media who exposed this scandal, thanks to mass media and helicopters. Not bloggers - and maybe you need a more diverse group of friends.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even that "all bloggers are search engine spammers" It's just that Google's algorithms are broken by blogs as currently implemented.

Google has PageRank(TM) in order sniff out potentially valuable results by reference. There's bound to be other clever stuff they do for the same purpose. It's just that it works optimally over normal (static) pages.

Blocks are curious bits of HTML. The massive cross-linking is unusual. So they just need their own method of indexing and ranking that teases useful stuff out.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[BandwidthHog]

And how do Google count something as a "blog"?

If it's made of wood?

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[cowscows]

Listen jackass, if you had heard more than just the national news, you'd know that the storm hit areas besides just New Orleans.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[jistanidiot]

I'd love to see "Bob's whining about life" containing 3,625 pages of rambling to be excluded from the index,

Of course the one page where Bob babbles on about all of the problems he had getting PHP and Oracle to play nicely and the obscure problem he had just happens to be the exact same problem you're having, you will wish his blog had been included in the index. As long as only relevant results are returned, it won't matter if the blogs are indexed or not.

Re:For the love of $DEITY

[Gr8Apes]

you really are on a tear.

In short - there was a good search without blogs. They added blogs, resulting in searches that were not as good (my opinion). Since blogs are a specific category that had to be added, why not have an opt in checkbox?

That seems much more in the spirit of google than forcing people to work around something.

Does that mean

[timecop]

That they will finally get rid of all the fucking duplicate blog search results from the main search?
I hate it when I search for some new electronics or something and first thing I see is 10 blogs repeating the same exact text of the press release and NO relevant info.

Re:Does that mean

[aussie_a]

I find it much more annoying to search on a topic only to have 10 websites repeating the content from Wikipedia. I know it's licensed under the GNU FDL, but give me a break! It's gotten to the stage where all of the results are JUST wikipedia mirrors

Re:Does that mean

[Flounder]

Kind of like looking up Java classes and seeing 30 sites duplicating the Sun API spec (layout and all).

Re:Does that mean

[John Bokma]

AOL to that, OTOH I will do everything to get my blog (http://johnbokma.com/mexit/) as far from this blog search engine as possible if it means that once you're in it, you're out of the main index. (I already renamed it to mexit ages ago when I noticed that Google indexed it slower, might have been a glitch though).

Re:Does that mean

[op12]

That's when I just type in a minus sign followed by some word that is common to that press release, but won't limit my search. Suddenly, all of those entries are gone! Yes, it's an extra step, but how long does that really take?

Re:Does that mean

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, or http://dmoz.org/ mirrors

Oh No!

[Azadre]

What will all the Russian hackers do with their zombies they used to use for Google Bombing? I know they only did it so their blogs would be high in the search from real pages and this Google service lets them be at the top. I guess the hackers could always use the Zombies to host some Doom 3 games ;)

It will not be long

[SLASHAttitude]

Google or M$ will more then likely just buy Technorati.

Re:It will not be long

[Infonaut]

Google or M$ will more then likely just buy Technorati.

I'm not so sure about that. If Google is already developing their own blog search and already runs Blogger. MS might be interested in Technorati, but I think they're trying to actually develop blog and search tools on their own, just to prove they can do it.

Re:It will not be long

[igbrown]

Actually, they already do, and to be honest, they seem to work a bit better than Google's blog search:

http://masternewmedia.org/RSS_search/RSS_search_to ols/MSN_RSS_search_improves_capabilities_20050831. htm

It's interesting to see MSN get the jump on Google, and do something a bit better, even.

Re:It will not be long

[Infonaut]

Thanks for the link.

I've noticed in the past that MSN Search picked up my blog entries very well, while Google missed them altogether. You're definitely right that MS got the jump on Google. I think that's actually a good thing. Google needs the competition.

What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[CyricZ]

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 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.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[aussie_a]

is Slashdot considered a "blog"?

Sure, it might be considered a blog by some, but it definitely isn't, according to Wikipedia:

The site resembles a blog in many ways, albeit with threaded comments.

(although unfortunately it's in the blog category. But I personally think it isn't a blog).

It seems that any page that is updated frequently with entries of some sort is considered a "blog"

Under that definition, Wikipedia is a blog.

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.

Perhaps the definition is "if it's found on Blog Search, it's a blog. Otherwise it isn't." Under this definition, slashdot is not a blog.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[Jugalator]

I always took them as a personal web log of one or more parts of your life.
That would make Slashdot: no, Borland: no, angsty kid: yes.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot -- as much as it hurts you pussies who scoff at the idea of reading one (for shame!) -- is absolutely a blog.

Regular, dated/chronological updates.. With comments on every *entry*. It's not a "I got my first period" personal blog, but it's definitely a [current events/news] blog.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[RobotRunAmok]

Sure, it might be considered a blog by some, but it definitely isn't, according to Wikipedia:

Wait, you're citing Wikipedia as to what constitutes a blog?!

My head just exploded. Thanks a lot.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[Eptisam]

"And that ends up being a vast majority of pages."

I don't think you could say that. It might be a vast majority of the pages you look at everyday, but I seriously doubt it would be a vast majority of the pages on the web.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[LiquidCoooled]

Each user on slashdot has a Journal which can be frequently updated with tales of geek angst.

Just because the articles on the front give us something to talk about collectively doesn't take anything away from the lively vibrant underbelly of slash.

Also, things like LiveJournal are included in google blogs, and they are threaded comments and discussions, just headlined by one person.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[daniil]

I always thought "web log" stood for a log of web sites you had recently visited. That would make Slashdot a collective web log.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[mdwh2]

Indeed. And furthermore, just as Slashdot has Journals, things are also confused in that LiveJournal has communities (shared groups where several people can post, and then people discuss them, just like Slashdot).

I'd say the key thing is any site that publishes frequent new pieces of information - it's about the type of technology, and not about what it's used for. So Slashdot, a personal journal, and a company's news items all count.

And a good way to handle this is through things like RSS feeds - which is exactly what Google are going for here. It's about handling a specific piece of technology, which is worthy of a separate search to take advantage of the usefulness of RSS (just as it would probably be confusing to mix usenet posts and webpages together).

Unfortunately, people see the word "blog", and think that it offers some magical way to exclude all the posts related to "things they don't want to read about".

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[Jugalator]

I'm not completely sure why you replied to my post, but if it was to say Slashdot is a blog despite the front page being a news page, I rather think that the journals are blogs because they're about personal interests and events, while Slashdot is a news site. I don't really see a reason to classify an entire domain as a blog or not.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[mdwh2]

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 on Borland's site considered a "blog"?

In the context of Google's new search: Yes, and Yes.

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

I don't think it's a downfall, you're just misunderstanding the intent. The intent is to search RSS and Atom feeds; sites which publish information frequently.

Google don't have separate search pages for "company websites", "news websites", "forums" and "personal homepages" for example, and it would be equally silly to have a separate one for "journals".

This is about searching a specific medium (information available over feeds) which *is* well defined. It's not about searching a particular topic - the topics should be filtered by the search words you use.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[wootest]

Here's what a "blog" is - writing (OR photos OR audio OR video OR any combination of them) published serially on the web, with or without archives. That's what it all boils down to.

My own definition of "blog" started out as "thoughtful writing accompanied with links" (much like the "personal journalism" angle taken by others) but as we can see in your post, where it's "angsty writing by a teenager" and basically just a published diary, there's really no consensus. One's definition tends to be colored by the type of "blogs" one frequents/dispises, and more and more people are using the word to describe their own web sites.

You can't even assume that "blogs" are personal, because businesses have started to host "business blogs" (not to be confused with actual personal "blogs" under the business domain) where everything goes through PR. It's just gotten to the point where it's no longer useful to ask if something is a "blog" because the only thing that could possibly be deduced is that it's a recurring list of entries rather than a static page.

Here's hoping that more people will, like you already have, realize this and stop judging things by that specific word: "blog".

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[radish]

Perhaps the definition is "if it's found on Blog Search, it's a blog. Otherwise it isn't." Under this definition, slashdot is not a blog.

But Blog Search will include anything with an RSS or Atom feed. That includes an awful lot of sites, many of which I struggle to see as being "Blogs" under any definition. For example, The BBC, The New York Times & CNN. Even Slashdot. So I think a better definition is needed.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[croddy]

being headlined by one person is the significant distinction. most people have zero interest in what one individual has to rant, but are glad to read a site where many can share their ideas.

slashdot and wikipedia allow thousands and thousands of people to submit stories, and a staff of editors (even if they do produce some dupes most days) -- not an individual -- screens the material for the site.

this is waht separates it from blogs: it is a product of the site's readership, not a top-down site controlled by a blogger.

Re:What exactly is a "blog" these days?

[WWWWolf]

That's silly. Years ago Slashdot was really an archetypical blog. (CmdrTaco posting stuff like "Linux possibly seen somewhere" every few moments.) These days, it's still a blog, just with atypically high volume of new articles/links, many many editors, and especially atypically high volume of comments! Who cares if comments are threaded or not, that means nothing!

Whoa, and it's not a beta!!

[Anonymous Coward]

... OK, just kidding ;-)

Re:Whoa, and it's not a beta!!

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, but it is: Google Blog Search BETA.

Re:Whoa, and it's not a beta!!

[Anonymous Coward]

way to not get the joke.

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.

Excellent

[CleverNickedName]

It does seem to give an excellent insight into the blog communities.

Search for: "interesting and well constructed points of view"
--- 0 Results found

Search for: "whining"
--- 99,051 Results found

Re:Excellent

[sketerpot]

Search for: "Sturgeon's law"
--- 240 Results found.

Hint hint.

Re:Excellent

[Dr.Opveter]

My life sucks

My life kicks ass

okay then..

Re:Excellent

[tompercival]

And now the only hit found for "interesting and well constructed points of view" is a blog containing an almost-copy of this post (see parent).

Plagiarism busted.

Re:Excellent

[Pneuma ROCKS]

Search for: "interesting and well constructed points of view" --- 0 Results found

Look it up now and you'll be looped for life.

You have been warned.

Re:Excellent

[tduff]

not any more. "Google 5 hours ago by Tom If you search for interesting and well constructed points of view it presently returns zero hits. But if you look for whining it returns a little short of 100000 web pages. Hmm. whqttt.com - http://whqttt.com/journal/journal.htm"

So will now.....

[amodm]

governments use this to figure out which bloggers of their country are violating regulations ?

PS: Not referring to singapore case in particular.

Re:So will now.....

[mc900ftjesus]

No, they use it to blogulate in the blogoshpere while using a DRM to ponder the blogtations.

Or, you could say that they update a web page daily. I don't understand why this crap is so popular. Did an internet buzz word make doing this popular? 10 years ago if I had an online diary, no one would've read it and I would have been made fun of, but slap a trendy word on it an it's the new pet rock.

Re:So will now.....

[InsideTheAsylum]

blogsearch.google.cn > "Who is giving away government secrets?"

3256 results found

Mmmm.. right,?

Now all they need to do

[seanyboy]

Is place link farms on a separate search page.
Then Google search will be useful again.

Re:Now all they need to do

[imr]

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.

Re:Now all they need to do

[boy_of_the_hash]

I can't wait for google to drop these parasites from their index.

ATOM & RSS

[mysqlrocks]

I like the fact that you can get search results in an ATOM or RSS feed.

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now can we get them out of OTHER searches?

Re:Removed from standard Google search?

[aussie_a]

I'd rather get back to being able to search for useful information without having to wade through ten million "mi pet hampstre had teh babys!!!11!!1!" links.

I guess it depends on what your searching for as to how many pet hampster blog posts you'll get. I personally have never had a pet hampster blog post in my search results.

As far as privacy goes...

[bloodgroove]

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.

Re:As far as privacy goes...

[amodm]

actually, a blog's pubic settings really should be matter of grave privacy concern....

not to nitpick, but the context was so good that couldn't help....sorry

Re:As far as privacy goes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it seems to be ignoring "no robots" tags on Livejournal.

Re:As far as privacy goes...

[mpk]

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 be breaking loose.

Re:As far as privacy goes...

[mdwh2]

An AC has already said this, but just to reiterate - it's ignoring the "Block robots/spiders" option on Livejournal accounts.

I've noticed this too. Strangely, my LJ and other people's I've checked seem to be excluded, but recently a friend pointed out that hers is listed by Google, and it's unclear what the difference is.

Re:As far as privacy goes...

[bloodgroove]

Damn you spell check, you have failed me again!

Re:As far as privacy goes...

[ChocoBean]

I'm not sure what LJ uses for the "block robots/spiders" option, but google sure ain't respecting that. This is the first personal evidence I have of google indexing for the sake of indexing, and doing Google Justice (TM) in the name of not censoring material.

I only wonder just how useful blog search is. Most of the stuff out there is young people whining about their sad lives that their actual school buddies won't bother reading. There are some good ones out there, but c'mon. When everyone and their grandmothers are allows to blog, there's got to be a lot of trash out there.

Incidentally Google Blog Search seems to leave "private" "friends" and "grouped" blog messages well alone.

Re:As far as privacy goes...

[TuxTWAP]

According to the About Blog Search page, they respect robots.txt and the nofollow, noindex and noarchive metatags. Livejournal uses the metatags for non-paid accounts. Blog Search is still spidering those, those. This is the first time I've ever seen Google not abide by one of their public statements. Somebody needs to get called on the carpet for this. Mail to the provided email address just gets you a form letter reply, btw.

Defined by publishing a site-feed

[TigerTale]

Google's Blog Search FAQ explains 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:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[TheRaven64]

By that definition BBC News is a Blog. So is The Register, for that matter, and most other news sites. Are news sites all Blogs?

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[John Bokma]

My feed is in the main index: http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Aindex.rss%2 0site%3Ajohnbokma.com However, I don't show up with Google's Blog Search (for example: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=La guna+de+Alchichica) Maybe I am doing something wrong, but if it means I am removed from the main index if I do it right, I keep doing it wrong. I don't want my blog, http://johnbokma.com/mexit/ to end up with LiveJournal, MySpace etc., thank you. The same sites that leech my pictures :-(

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, theregister is a blog unless your name is Andrew Orlowski in which case you have other issues.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[zootm]

Yes, since a blog is a "web log". Originally this definition only extended to logs about one's own life or whatever, but I see no reason it shouldn't be extended to logs of news and so forth. Not really the "accepted" definition, but that's incredibly hazy as-is.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[PetriBORG]

Sometimes it would seem more relevant to just copy and paste the text from the said site and link back to it no? But oh wait, then you couldn't mislead people. Argh I don't mean to incite a pissing match, but:

4. Which blogs are included in Blog Search?
The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

5. 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.

As can be seen by the questions you directly linked to, google doesn't say just any old site that includes an RSS feed is considered a blog, no it says in fact any blog that publishes a site feed.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[TobascoKid]

The first "web logs" I came across (back in the early day of the web)were single pages containing links to sites some person had visted, maybe with a one line description of the link, ie a log of visted websites. I suppose slashdot is that idea on steroids.

The online personal journal seems to have come later and I'm not sure why they're called "web logs" - I suppose there is some similarity with the slashdot style web log in presentation and even the software used to drive them - but the content is certainly different.

I suppose defining a blog as a site or part of a site where the contents are ordered chronologically is probably the best way to define it. It's a pretty broad reach and that does include things like news sites, so you do have to wonder if you really need to seperate them from the greater Web. Still, I suppose being able to google for RSS/Atom feeds will have its uses.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[Dave2 Wickham]

While they may say that, one of my RSS feeds which isn't a blog is included in Blog Search. They also don't seem to provide any way to keep it out of the index (apart from the over-general robots.txt for Googlebot).

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[spif]

In Soviet Russia, the latest news has blogs.

But really, are we still suffering under the delusion that CNN is inherently more important than, say, Instapundit?

I'd say Hearst is laughing in his grave, but there you have it.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[PetriBORG]

It would appear that google considers sourceforge as a blog site, go figure.
Must be why its "beta," har.

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.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[nightsweat]

There goes the New York Times.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[gumbo]

Hmm. Of course, when I added code for an RSS feed to my non-blog site, I also added code to ping a ping service whenever something new was added as well. I figured that the more places that index my site and link to it (even temporarily in a "newly pinged" list), the more traffic I'd get. If someone added RSS to a site, adding a ping seems like a natural step whether it's really a blog or not.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

While I remember the 'Web Logs' you reference, I think the closer ancester to what we now consider blogs would just be the simple news/updates pages on personal project pages, usually driven by a NewsPro CGI script. I know I ran one on brained.org back in early 1999.

Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed

[jred]

I just replace the pics w/ goatse. Let them leech that.

blog or boring diary

[Bubba-T]

For the BLOG search or increasingly every search to work they have to get rid of the junk.

I searched for just a handful terms in the blogsearc and was redirected to homes4sale sites more than anything else. BLOGS need to be BLOGS. We need to get rid of BLOGS from the main search or at least allow me to exclude them. To many "DEAR DIARY" I met a cute boy last night at the mall BLOGS out there for me.

Some say technorati & friends have nightmares

[jurt1235]

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.

memeorandum.com

[fundflow]

The best blog summary is memeorandum.com

I doubt it can be beaten

Spam content

[Anonymous Coward]

Needs some work. Several topics full of web search optimization spam.

Re:Removed from standard Google search?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was mearly a metaphorical example. All blog posts are the intellectual equivalent of "mi pet hampstre had teh babys!!!11!!1!"

Keysearch

[WebfishUK]

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!

Re:Keysearch

[Anonymous Coward]

You need one of these http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/ev ents/keylistener.html

Re:Keysearch

[Anonymous Coward]

when will they do something really useful like keysearch, I never loose my blog

perhaps a grammar check or a phrase speller would be a good start, slacker

Re:Keysearch

[Anonymous Coward]

Your keys fell off the counter and are located behind the potted plant.

Re:Keysearch

[Anonymous Coward]

I never loose [sic] my blog, but I'm forever misplacing my keys!

That's why the good folks at Ask Jeeves created the Jeeves 90000 (beta).

Re:Keysearch

[WebfishUK]

blimey you were right. Burn the witch!

Clean UI

[alex4u2nv]

Its the same UI on all their search technology... =)

comics are blogs now?

[potaz]

Yeah, it's weird what's being considered a blog. My comic ( http://www.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?

Re:comics are blogs now?

[thenetbox]

Basically its crawling XML feeds. You have an XML feed so I guess thats what google considers a blog.

Its also true for actual Blogs without XML feeds. They aren't indexed because google doesn't consider them a blog.

So I guess a blog (in googles dictionary) is anything with a feed of some sort.

Re:comics are blogs now?

[Myrmi]

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.

Re:comics are blogs now?

[TheSync]

Oh, so you do a "blomic"!

Re:comics are blogs now?

[Council]

(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 my OWN crap is to wget the whole thing from the calendar page and then grep.

I mean, that's what I pay Google to do!

Re:comics are blogs now?

[Angst Badger]

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.

Re:comics are blogs now?

[potaz]

Hah, oh God. Worst word ever!

Re:comics are blogs now?

[potaz]

Yeah man, Livejournal's search is awful. I find even searching my own entries is awkward, and based off of that experience I've never tried to search the journals of others. COME ON LIVEJOURNAL, PICK UP THE PACE

Re:comics are blogs now?

[potaz]

Hah, thanks man! But, I believe I'm also the top hit for "robot erotica", so perhaps there was still hope!

Re:comics are blogs now?

[Council]

That's what I'm sayin', Google should just invade. Except the paranoid guy in me is getting kinda worried about them. I do hope they're not evil or anything.

P.S. Congrats on the "to to"; next use "that that". It seems that that is bad on first glance but it's definitely proper speech. But there might be some simple rule. MYSTERIES OF GRAMMAR.

Speaking of grammar this is the second random place I've run into you today outside of Dinosaur Comics. I found your Page of Robot Lesbian Erotica and said "hey this writing looks familiar." And lo.

Re:comics are blogs now?

[saskboy]

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

I don't have an insightful mod to give you, so I'm just replying instead.

Re:comics are blogs now?

[TheSync]

I was joking. Unfortunately, others are not.

Too late for nightmares...

[soboroff]

If Technorati or other bloggers are having nightmares about blog search, it's way too late. Frankly, since having a successful blog is all about being read, I think that bloggers would clamor for good search tools.

Speaking of which, there's been a workshop on blogs and blog search at the past couple WWW conferences. Here's some links:

http://www.blogpulse.com/www2004-workshop.html
http://www.blogpulse.com/www2005-workshop.html

a blog is nothing more than just another website

[Anonymous Coward]

... so why not include just another google operator like for example searching in "site:slashdot.org"

why do we need a special blog search?

blogs are just another more "leet" word for lame homepages, websites, personal trash....

blogs are just another hype at the moment, something new will follow....

so why bother with a separate blog search. you can already find blog pages with normal search. a simple operator would have been sufficient, or the operator you can use is the additional keyword "blog" if you care....

jebuz.....

Re:Removed from standard Google search?

[JoeBar]

I think we all know what he was searching for when that came up..

Hey is the GP Richard Gere!??!

Out of Ideas

[KrisCowboy]

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?

Re:Out of Ideas

[coolGuyZak]

EPIC

Re:Out of Ideas

[bogaboga]

What about video? I know they have http://video.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 breathing a sigh of relief about this very fact. They are not alone!

Re:Out of Ideas

[panck]

my predictions ;)

pubic setting

[tonigonenstein]

1. shaved 2. wood 3. jungle

Want to add your blog?

[tcopeland]

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...

Works well.

[CABAN]

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.

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.

[thenetbox]

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.

Re:Works well.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did the same for my hometown.

The first three pages were almost completely real estate listings, with a few golf lessons and articles from the local paper thrown in.

Real estate listings?

I was just thinking

[kurt_ram]

Isn't Slashdot Multi-Player Blogging?

Yep

[Willy on Wheels]

I have pwned by blog search!

Well, that explains things.

[RamonetB]

"Sane"
130,249 results.

"Insane"
482,040 results.

There's a research paper in here somewhere, I know it!

Re:Well, that explains things.

[DeadSea]

"not sane"
1,532 results

"not insane"
4,653 results

Diary as literature

[Bob3141592]

For better or worse, logs are a cultural sign of the times. Now instead of just 15 minutes of fame, you can be accessable to the world 24-7 with your own personal blog. Of course, that's 27-7 divided by 800 million, but still....

There was a time when "I Love Lucy" was min driviling, mindless entertainment (or for the Lucy fans, substitute "Gilligan's Island"). Now it's an important cultural icon. Who knows if, in the fullness of time, what Suzy did last night will be a simple embarrassment or a social revelation.

What would be really nice is some AI capability in the search engine that takes info from your personal profile and uses it to construct a rating of significance according to your own values. That might even be a reason to actually have a profile.

My blog sample page

[Red Flayer]

(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

[Errtu76]

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?

Re:google search extra line

[markpapadakis]

Google Sitemaps seems to be responsible for those links. You follow Google's suggestion, you get some handy links whenever your site shows up in the results, among other benefits..

Re:google search extra line

[Errtu76]

Thanks! I've browsed through the documentation a bit, and it seems that the webmaster is responsible for creating this sitemap, and then submitting it to google. Completely offtopic ofcourse, but it seems that whoever webmasters microsoft.com also took the time and effort to create a sitemap and submit it to google.

And i thought MS didn't like Google :)

Re:google search extra line

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think it's related to sitemaps - it's just a new feature Google has been playing around with - mostly on searches for big brand names (try some UK bank names for example).

Re:google search extra line

[adpowers]

Correct, I'm nearly positive that it isn't from sitemaps. I saw this a few months ago and since then more websites have these "enhanced snippets".

The newest thing I've been seeing is having a section of the search results filled with 'corrected' searches. If you search for something, and Google thinks there is a better query, it will put a little section in the middle of the SERP with results from the other query. I haven't found it that useful yet, but we'll see. One query it happens for is [to be or not to be]. The recommend query becomes ["to be or not to be"] and the results are much better. For the normal query, you get Hot or Not, Do Not Call Registry, GNU, Not in Our Name, and BugMeNot. In the corrected search results, you actually get stuff relevant to Shakespeare. When I search for [o'reilly], it recommends [o'reilly auto parts], so perhaps it still needs work.

Andrew

Blog = Personal Journalism

[linzeal]

I refer to blogging as personal journalism so that fits into my definition.

Re:Blog = Personal Journalism

[croddy]

and likewise, alex chiu is "personal science"?

Re:Blog = Personal Journalism

[linzeal]

There is a difference between journalism which can have editorals to science which strives for a naturalized epistemology.

Yey another beta from Google. I'm so unimpressed

[elrous0]

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)

Technorati

[Kainaw]

I read this as Technocrati and assumed the editor was making a poor attempt to pluralize Technocrat. It made no sense at all that a technical expert would fear a blog search engine.

Well, when you realice that the 'c' is missing, you can ask, "What the hell is Technorati?" It is a blog search engine. Am I the only person on slashdot who doesn't know about Technorati?

Re:Technorati

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Livejournal jokes! Was: Re:Well, it does work.

[wirah]

Oh I see, so you wantLivejournal Jokes!

where are the blogs?

[Anonymous Coward]

it does not only find blog entries... it returned me osnews.com and freshmeat.net pages just to name a few. frequently updated site != blog (as somebody has already mentioned)

Why so many ads?

[johncheng]

Did a search for my neighborhood: Encino San Fernando Valley. Most results were for real estate sales. I wonder if this is the nature of blogs or google still need to refine the ranking algorithm.

Superb - that was funny ;-)

[cheros]

That made me laugh, thanks ;-)

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)

Re:Clean UI?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not clean, it's sparse and there's a very big difference between the two.

Explain~

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.

Slashdot and Google sitting in a tree...

[zmokhtar]

Is it just me or does slashdot look more and more like a Google press release page?

Blogged about this last night

[burtonator]

I blogged about this last night...

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.

"Splog"-ridden

[brownpau]

Phentermine.
Viagra.
Personal Injury Lawyer.
Texas Holdem Poker.

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

Will they take Blogs out of the main index now?

[nagora]

THAT would be progress.

TWW

Don't use it yet!

[kentyman]

Don't use it yet, it's still in beta!

Blogs as resource pages

[mparaz]

Some people set up blogs - or use blog software - as an easy path to personal publishing.

Speaking of Java multithreading, I have an open source Java resource that might feature that topic sometime. I set it up as a blog - with Wordpress it's just a few easy steps.

wow

[loconet]

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!

[rjnagle]

I searched for my alias/weblog idiotprogrammer.

Number one search result is hairlossworld.info

Way to go google!

Not anymore...

[seanvaandering]

Go figure, so some guy quickly makes a blog about this exact thing so he can get mass hits off Slashdot....

If you search for interesting and well constructed points of view it presently returns zero hits. But if you look for whining it returns a little short of 100000 web pages. Hmm. whqttt.com - http://whqttt.com/journal/journal.htm

The SEO companies are already working on ways to defeat the system, this seems to be one of them.

Re:Clean UI?

[yannick_mt]

The role of a UI is to be functional. It should not distract the user. 10/10 for Google here. The role of a logo is to be recognizable. It also does the job in the case of Google.
A good logo != a slick logo.
Take the Coca Cola logo for instance. It also looks dated. But it does the job and it's been in people's mind for several generations now. My guess is that Coca Cola won't change or try to "improve" their logo anytime soon.

Important for a different reason

[bushidocoder]

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 prefer MSN's version just for searching syndicated feeds, but hopefully competition in this space with force both to improve themselves.

wow

[hyperstation]

it's like indexing a litter box, turd by turd.

OT: New feature?

[slashflood]

Ever noticed the additional Google links (download, support, support, screenshots, ...), when you enter something like Abiword, Firefox, OpenOffice, KDE, ...? Nice feature.

Watch for upcoming /. postings!

[PetoskeyGuy]

http://www.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=Roland+Pi quepaille&btnG=Search+Blogs

Wow

[carguy84]

something useful 3,622 Results

viagra 80,343 Results

yet....

I hate spam 851 Results

Go figure

Heh, interesting.

[Swedentom]

Google Blog Search doesn't find my blog. But when I search for my name, a post on the Apple Carbon-Dev mailing list shows up. I didn't know that was a blog. :-)

Thanks, blogger who works at the competition!

[ewg]

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.

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.

Stock Market

[Danger Stevens]

"angst" is followed closely by "Stock Market" which gives 98,532 results.

They're not all 13 year olds you know. Many are innovative publishers who are making a living off of content production.

Updating indexes?

[rincebrain]

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?

Re:Updating indexes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, if you want sites to be *protected* you have to do more than just remove obvious links to them.

You know. Remove the content or put it behind a password (e.g. .htaccess), although the latter may be difficult on LiveJournal...

Re:Updating indexes?

[Geekbot]

I don't see why. I know that on Xanga, the protected content is only protected by a Javascript as far as I can tell. You can either 1) Turn off Java Scripting 2) Hit the stop button after the text has loaded but before the Javascript runs. If LJ is similar, then there is no point going to the trouble of hiding content that is barely hidden.

Re:Updating indexes?

[Anonymous Coward]

No; livejournal has real security. If you're not logged in, you get a bog standard boring 403 Not Authenticated.

If you are logged in but not authorised to that particular post, you get an explicit error message.

Re:Updating indexes?

[mdwh2]

Umm, if you want sites to be *protected* you have to do more than just remove obvious links to them.

You know. Remove the content or put it behind a password (e.g. .htaccess), although the latter may be difficult on LiveJournal...

I imagine that by "Protected", he meant "put behind a password" - which is trivial to do on LiveJournal.

Search what obsessive assholes are interested in

[gelfling]

Oooh boy - The hypermetaBlog. It'll be so lovely and yet not useful to index all the links that link to each others links which list all the links that link to each other.

It will be the ultimate Blog - a ginormous list that lists all the list that list the lists that list all the Blogs.

Japanese ecchi

[ChibiOne]

No way! One of the things I love about Google Japan is the ability to throw Ero (as in "erotic") blogs as search results for "ecchi" ("adult related"). Gotta love those sweet japanese amateur gals blogging their sex life away (pictures included).

Re:Japanese ecchi

[Anonymous Coward]

what?, no links?

It's a metadata search tool...

[ear1grey]

From: here

Google's blogsearch is, fundamentally, a metadata search that has the benefit of being integrated with the rest of the Google empire.

i.e. it "just" adds metadata to the list of things that can be searched effectively.

The killer feature of blogsearch is the fact that search results can be output using RSS and Atom formats (in addition to the familiar web page).

i.e. it does something that the main search can't do yet.

Blogsearch is a very good indicator of future improvements to Google's main search service, and provides some useful functions today.

i.e. there's no reason why the main search shouldn't do it in the future. So overall, expect to see the capabilities that are today branded "blogsearch" rolled into the main Google search next year sometime.

Privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

My Blogger blog lists my real name absolutely nowhere. My blogger profile has my first name, but even that's not public. However, I have a gmail address. Searches with my real name as a string return my blogger blog, implying google are matching my overall google profile to my blogger account when searching. In my case it's not serious, but this is probably going to catch a lot of gmail&blogger users out...

Ideas for improvements...

[Skim123]

Just a few ideas off the top of my head:

• RSS/Atom feed to blog search results (blog search sites like IceRocket allow for this)
• Meta-stats on the 'blogosphere' (excuse me for using that term). Basically be able to see trends in keywords and whatnot. Like Google Zeitgeist, but for blogs.
• Integration with Google's Search History. At the moment, my blog searches on Google aren't showing up in my search history.
• Ability to add my blog - that is, let me enter the URL to my blog's RSS or Atom feed.
• Stats on the individual blog level - how many times did my blog show up in search results? How many click throughs? Eventually I hope Google provides a service like FeedBurner. They have the data and infrastructure there, so I don't see why they wouldn't/couldn't.

OMFGWTFBBQLOL! Pretty pictures!

[SeanDuggan]

Woohoo! Another site with pretty pictures for me to link to! I'm sure they won't mind the free advertising from people backtracking the picture links...

And yes, I am kidding, although the scorpion and tarantula pictures are pretty nice.

Re:OMFGWTFBBQLOL! Pretty pictures!

[John Bokma]

Thanks. Maybe a nice fact: the pics are made with an extremely outdated Philips ESP 60, a zero point three megapixel camera. I am often amazed at what I am able to get out of it, OTOH I hope to replace it Very Soon Now (TM).

Experimental Search...

[Jipster]

A quick search for Bloggers in my home area of desolate Fargo resulted in 65,580 hits, but a vast majority of them are for Wells Fargo credit cards. In other words, methinks this needs a little work.

indexes appear to be different

[blamanj]

Upon searching for a rather unique phrase I ran across in a blog, I see that the main Google index contains two hits for that phrase, both at the blog, and the blogsearch contains nine hits for that phrase, all from the same blog.

Re:Removed from standard Google search?

[R2.0]

"Hey is the GP Richard Gere!??!"

(G)erry Penacoli?

New way of breaking down search results

[Sefert]

Really, we don't want to exclude blogs. Though I do think being able to specify them explicitly is nice. The solution is to provide a preliminary breakdown of results when there are pissloads of em. (Like over 100 maybe?). For instance, group them into bubbles, so if you search for Katrina, one bubble would be all entries about the Hurricane, another would be famous people called Katrina, a third locations of that name, etc. Even having a second set of results that sort by genre of web page would be handy - one by news, another by blog, etc. This would seem far more sensible than creating a separate search tool for each type of entry - we can just drill down into whatever category is most useful at the time.

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.

Re:Using "-blog"

[arose]

Blogs aren't all that bad, some have useful information. The 'review' and 'user review' sites that just link to internet stores are much worse, but at least someone is working on that.

Let's try some sample searches:

[Anonymous Coward]

How about:

Cindy Sheehan. Yup! Gets a great blog about how wacky she is.

Homeowner's Association. Yup! A blog on the horrors of Homeowners associations

Microsoft. Yup! A blog on how wonderful Microsoft is.

This blog search looks great!

"Redirecting to..."

[bogie]

Does anyone else find that annoying that links are no longer real links for Google?

Gotta get them to update the CustomizeGoogle plugin for Firefox to remove this crap.

Coming soon, user clicks search result, "please wait for this ad to finish loading before your directed to your search result".

Re:"Redirecting to..."

[jose parinas]

Yes, blogsearch doesnt put clean links, always you are redirected, in google you don't have this. Perhaps in the near future they will put ads on this redirect page, go figure...

HALIBUT.

[Grendel Drago]

Search for "HALIBUT". I... I've never been the top result for anything before. This is weird.

--grendel drago

great security... :rolleyes:

[nilbog]

It shows both protected and deleted entries from my blog. Yippie. Google, fix this.

IT seems to be more "keyword based"...

[callipygian-showsyst]

...and less "quality links pointing to it" based for search results. This means that the old (now useless) techniques of getting more search hits by simply putting "sexy cheerleader lesbian panties" or "free ipods" on your webpage will help you get hits on Google Blog search as well.

links on blogsearch

[jose parinas]

When you search on google blogsearch, if you click on links, you got redirected to another google site, and later you are redirected to the source blog. Is Google analyzing every click you are doing on this tool??

Why the links redirect to other google page?

[jose parinas]

In google, every link is clean, a direct url to the site you are searching. Now we have this intermediate page Redirecting you to ... Would this page filled with ads in the future?

Results from random searches-anything interesting?

[Cutting_Crew]

any of these numbers interest you??

"Blogs" - 857,605
"Slashdot" - 53,372
"Outsourcing" - 82,388
"Windows XP" - 134,227
"Windows 2000" - 84,072
"Windows 2K" - 3,114
"Windows 98" - 43,386
"Linux" - 291,186
"Mac" - 556,896
"Xbox" - 225,822
"PS2" - 186,089
"GameCube" - 61,346
"Spyware" - 165,792
"Hacker" - 46,264
"Microsoft" - 565,533
"Microsoft Vista - 20,367
"iTunes" - 175,921
"Hurricane Katrina" - 433,509
"pwned" - 10,983
"newbie" - 54,042
"World of Warcraft mom" - 2,306
"Nvidia" - 19,904
"ATI" - 40,659
"3dfx" - 591
"C++" - 57,489
"Java" - 237,679
"OpenGL - 6,664
"DirectX - 7,546

last but certainly not least..
"Google" - 2,175,983

Your methodology...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is insane!

Re:For the love of $DEITY: POOR DUCK!

[Maow]

--

One time I threw a brick at a duck.

Poor duck!

Did it duck?!?

Thank you - I'm here all week - thank you very much.

The difference is time relevance

[wastedbrains]

There is a useful aspect of the blog search on the fact that it is time relevant. I mean googles index has no idea of time it is just the best believe result for your key words. Blog searches taking into account time offer much different results search president bush on goolge it will be the same things for months and months, search on blog search engines you get currently relevant results about the president in the last few days, such as bush talking about new orleans currently. I find this more valuable then to find a blog site or a non blog, I want timeless information and timely information about the same thing. Search machine learning come up with large sources and ideas on google search it on blog searches and read developers of machine learning techniques and how they are applying it and working with it right NOW. That is very usefull, if you just say to blog or not to blog, who cares. shameless plug: http://www.bandddesigns.com/blogger/

The issue of Time is what matters

[wastedbrains]

There is a useful aspect of the blog search on the fact that it is time relevant. I mean googles index has no idea of time it is just the best believe result for your key words. Blog searches taking into account time offer much different results search president bush on goolge it will be the same things for months and months, search on blog search engines you get currently relevant results about the president in the last few days, such as bush talking about new orleans currently. I find this more valuable then to find a blog site or a non blog, I want timeless information and timely information about the same thing. Search machine learning come up with large sources and ideas on google search it on blog searches and read developers of machine learning techniques and how they are applying it and working with it right NOW. That is very usefull, if you just say to blog or not to blog, who cares. shameless plug: http://www.bandddesigns.com/blogger/

Technorati still rocks because...

[fleener]

Google's database has less than half of my blog postings since the beginning of Google's June 2005 logging. When I search for many of my postings the only sign they exist is the search results that show OTHER blogs linking to my entries. Technorati is complete. Google is a newbie. I'll stick with the pros.

Re:Technorati still rocks because...

[Baricom]

Technorati is also much more current than Google (which, after all, is Technorati's stated mission). Consider the most recent posts matching these searches, all fairly relevant right now:

dreamhost (A big web hosting provider that had a major power outage yesterday)
T: 1 hour - G: 2 hours

"john roberts" (Supreme Court chief justice nominee)
T: 24 minutes - G: 25 minutes

"ipod nano" (Recently released)
T: 13 minutes - G: 16 minutes

katrina (Major Hurricane that hit New Orleans)
T: 7 minutes - G: 57 minutes

yahoo mail (Getting ready to launch a beta with a new DHTML API)
T: 14 minutes - G: 50 minutes

google blog search
T: 7 minutes - G: 19 minutes

technorati
T: 18 minutes - G: 20 minutes

slashdot
T: 49 minutes - G: 2 hours ago

I couldn't find a single search that returned more current results in Google than Technorati. I think for the foreseeable future, Technorati has searching the World Live Web down.

A possible solution for google w/o blogs

[metaphorever]

I agree with you that knowing how to restrict your searches is a very good thing, however since google now has a blog search it should be possible to run two parallel searches for the same terms and then exclude the blog hits that match the google hits. Unsafe Search does something like this with google's safe search so I would assume something similar could be made using their blog search. But, since I don't have the programming knowledge to make such a thing I will leave that to another enterprising slashdotter.

Miserable Failure? don't get me started!

[CProgrammer98]

I thought it was "miserable failure" - and quite deserving too especially in the light of his latest stunt

What an utter bastard he is - and no spine. Big Bidness shouts jump, he says "how high?".

Sorry, I'll get off ma soapbox now.

Re:Miserable Failure? don't get me started!

[CProgrammer98]

I'll try that again. Maybe I'll preview it..

His latest stunt

There. We're good now.

Re:Yey another beta from Google. I'm so unimpresse

[shutdown -p now]

I don't think we can really complain about it. After all, it means they are learning from the FOSS community, after all...

What a great service!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do a search for G4 Tech TV and get useful blogs like this! The web gets better and better every day.

nice to know...

[Anonymous Coward]

nice to know gftv beat slashdot to this story.