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.

[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.

[joshdick]

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

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.

[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.

[hachete]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

It will not be long

[SLASHAttitude]

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

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.

Whoa, and it's not a beta!!

[Anonymous Coward]

... OK, just kidding ;-)

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.

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.

Now all they need to do

[seanyboy]

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

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.

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

[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.

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: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

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?

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

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?

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.

Well, that explains things.

[RamonetB]

"Sane"
130,249 results.

"Insane"
482,040 results.

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

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?

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)

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)

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.

hairloss.info--yeah right!

[rjnagle]

I searched for my alias/weblog idiotprogrammer.

Number one search result is hairlossworld.info

Way to go google!

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.

wow

[hyperstation]

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

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?

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.

great security... :rolleyes:

[nilbog]

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