Google's Blog Search

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @12:54AM 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."

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Well, it does work. by Willeh · 2005-09-14 00:55 · 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 databyss · 2005-09-14 01:24 · 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!
2. Re:Well, it does work. by ahaning · 2005-09-14 03:41 · 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."
For the love of $DEITY by kote-men-do · 2005-09-14 00:56 · 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 · 2005-09-14 01:09 · 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 · 2005-09-14 01:16 · 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 · 2005-09-14 01:19 · 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 · 2005-09-14 01:21 · 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 · 2005-09-14 01:23 · 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 · 2005-09-14 01:58 · 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 · 2005-09-14 02:12 · 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 · 2005-09-14 03:43 · 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 · 2005-09-14 03:50 · 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.
What exactly is a "blog" these days? by CyricZ · 2005-09-14 00:59 · 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.

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Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Whoa, and it's not a beta!! by Anonymous Coward · 2005-09-14 01:01 · Score: 5, Funny

... OK, just kidding ;-)
Excellent by CleverNickedName · 2005-09-14 01:02 · 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
So will now..... by amodm · 2005-09-14 01:02 · 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.
Now all they need to do by seanyboy · 2005-09-14 01:03 · 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
Defined by publishing a site-feed by TigerTale · 2005-09-14 01:05 · 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.
comics are blogs now? by potaz · 2005-09-14 01:16 · 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?

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dinosaur comics
Works well. by CABAN · 2005-09-14 01:20 · 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.
Well, that explains things. by RamonetB · 2005-09-14 01:22 · 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.
wow by hyperstation · 2005-09-14 02:38 · Score: 5, Funny

it's like indexing a litter box, turd by turd.
Updating indexes? by rincebrain · 2005-09-14 03:34 · 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?

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