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Google's Blog Search

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

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."

34 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Well, it does work. by Willeh · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
    1. Re:Well, it does work. by porkThreeWays · · Score: 3, Funny

      254,761 results for "emo" ;)

      --
      If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
    2. Re:Well, it does work. by databyss · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      --
      Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
    3. Re:Well, it does work. by gehel · · Score: 3, Funny

      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 ...

    4. Re:Well, it does work. by ahaning · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
  2. For the love of $DEITY by kote-men-do · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)?

    1. Re:For the love of $DEITY by nuclear305 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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'

    2. Re:For the love of $DEITY by Stephen+Williams · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

    3. Re:For the love of $DEITY by Threni · · Score: 5, Funny

      > 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?

    4. Re:For the love of $DEITY by a16 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

    5. Re:For the love of $DEITY by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:For the love of $DEITY by cowscows · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --

      One time I threw a brick at a duck.

    7. Re:For the love of $DEITY by Jerf · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.)

    8. Re:For the love of $DEITY by bheer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > 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).

      --
      Go somewhere random
    9. Re:For the love of $DEITY by Irish_Samurai · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.
  3. What exactly is a "blog" these days? by CyricZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
  4. Whoa, and it's not a beta!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... OK, just kidding ;-)

  5. Excellent by CleverNickedName · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

    --


    Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
  6. So will now..... by amodm · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    PS: Not referring to singapore case in particular.

  7. Now all they need to do by seanyboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
  8. Re:Removed from standard Google search? by aussie_a · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  9. As far as privacy goes... by bloodgroove · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  10. Defined by publishing a site-feed by TigerTale · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:Defined by publishing a site-feed by JimRay · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      My other computer is your Windows box
  11. Keysearch by WebfishUK · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!

    --
    -- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
  12. Re:Does that mean by aussie_a · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  13. comics are blogs now? by potaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
    dinosaur comics
    1. Re:comics are blogs now? by Angst+Badger · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

      --
      Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
  14. Re:Removed from standard Google search? by JoeBar · · Score: 3, Funny
    I think we all know what he was searching for when that came up..

    Hey is the GP Richard Gere!??!

  15. Works well. by CABAN · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  16. Well, that explains things. by RamonetB · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Sane"
    130,249 results.

    "Insane"
    482,040 results.

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

    --
    For castles made of sand must eventually return to the sea.
  17. wow by hyperstation · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  18. Updating indexes? by rincebrain · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
    It's only an insult if it's not true.