Google's added yet another beta product to their lineup, this time it's the Google Blog Search. This new search service competes directly with other blog search engines, such as IceRocket and Technorati. I've been using IceRocket to search the “blogosphere” as of late, and they seem to have very few splog sites in their results. Furthermore, IceRocket sorts the results chronologically (whereas Google sorts by relevancy by default) and has neat little tools like the Blog Trends Tool. However, I do find that IceRocket's response time can be a bit slow at times; that is, doing a search or going to the next page of results might take a couple seconds, whereas with Google it's instantaneous. Both IceRocket and Google Blog Search provide an RSS (or Atom) feed of the search results.
What's most disappointing with Google Blog Search (and IceRocket, to a lesser degree) is the predominance of splog entries. If you do a search on anything remotely spammy - lasik, cialis, texas holdem, etc. - the majority of the results are going to be splog sites. Mark Cuban points the finger at Blogger.com in his post A splog here, a splog there, pretty soon it ads up... and we all lose:
What makes the problem particularly frustrating is that it doesn’t cost anything to setup a blog on what is probably the most common blog host, blogger.com from Google. It’s fast, its easy, it’s free and it can be automated. [Note from Scott: you can make a new blog entry in Blogger.com by simply sending an email message to a specified address...] So blogs are coming at us left and right. We are killing off thousands a day, but they keep on coming. Like Zombies. It’s straight from Night of the Living Dead. Brain dead splogs. Coming at us by the thousands.
Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they don’t seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs. Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel. Can we get some help on this Google?
Keep in mind that Mark is one of the owners/investors in IceRocket... Speaking of Mark Cuban, he also has a great entry on Google's Blog Search as well, comparing it to IceRocket and listing the major concerns he finds with Google's latest offer: Welcome to the show Google BlogSearch.
Hopefully Google will figure out a good compromise, one that eliminates the vast, vast majority of splog sites but that doesn't nullify any (or many) legit sites.
There are also a number of features currently missing from Google's Blog Search that will, I'm certain, be added eventually. Some of these include:
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No integration with Google Search History
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No “Blogs” tab atop the Google search results (akin to the Images, News, Groups headings)
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No way to submit my blog's RSS/Atom feed. According to
Google Blog Search Help, “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.”
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No means of categorization. It would be nice to be able to drill into blogs by topic rather than just having to do a keyword search.
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Lack of meta-statistics on the blogosphere. A buzz index like IceRocket provides or other metadata that can be gleamed from Google's massive index would be most appreciated.