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Launched in the early morning hours today, Google Blog Search does not
attempt to innovate; it sticks tried-and-true to the spare design sensibility that is Google’s look-and-feel trademark.
The test is not bells and whistles, but quality of results. Many observers are playing Technorati’s funeral dirge, but
a lot of use must happen before the dust settles and we can see how Google’s new engine shakes out.
Google Blog Search crawls feeds only. This important point means that blogs without feeds (there are plenty
of them) are excluded from results. How Google distinguishes a blog feed from a mainstream news feed is unknown to me.
Another point is that blogs publishing partial-entry feeds (many, many of these) will suffer a damaged profile in
results because much of their text remains uncrawled. You could argue that this drawback is the publisher’s problem,
not Google’s. You could also argue that Google Blog Search is misnamed, given its narrow, full-feed publishing
requirements.
 My first impressions are mixed. I ran several parallel searches in
Google Blog Search, Technorati, BlogPulse, and IceRocket. Each engine starred in one or more searches, trouncing the
others with volume and quality of results. Google does not fare particularly well in keyword searching or URL
searching. Interestingly, Google Blog Search automatically prefixes a URL search with the link: operator,
defaulting the search to incoming link sources. That’s a good idea, but my testing indicates it doesn’t always locate
incoming links as well as competing engines do. I do notice, though, that Google smartly strips out incestuous incoming
links from the same domain—an easy aspect to notice here at Weblogs Inc, where we have dozens of blog all linking to
each other. In particular, our weekly “Best Of…” post, placed on most of the blogs, does not appear in Google search
results when the URL of a spotlighted entry is placed in the search box.
Users may subscribe to feeds (Atom or RSS) of search results—a handy feature but hardly a unique one.
The Advanced Search page offers date-constrained searches, author searches, title searches, and URL searches, in
addition to form-based Boolean operators.
After some initial testing, my preliminary conclusion is that Google Blog Search is another entry in a crawded
field, hardly a juggernaut at first glance. But presumably the engine is under continuous development, and more use
will paint a more detailed and informed picture.
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