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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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.

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.

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 ;)

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?

[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.

Now all they need to do

[seanyboy]

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

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: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?

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: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: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.

great security... :rolleyes:

[nilbog]

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