Google Blog Search

By now you have heard about Google’s Blog Search release. Is there anything to write home about here?

On the plus side, a blog search engine is able to handle infinitely more blogs than a blog directory. It is open to the whole world wide web not just those that have been submitted to a directory. Google enters this arena of search well after others (see IceRocket) have been at it for awhile.

Is the search tool helpful? Yes and no. I have a problem with it. I suppose it is a problem of searching in general. I am interested in finding blogs ABOUT ecommerce. I entered “ecommerce” into the blog search engine. The blog search engine searched blog content (ie posts). 14 of the first 20 results were all from the same blog. The blog it found the most was indeed a blog about ecommerce. It had the term “ecommerce” in the blog name. However, since this one blog had “ecommerce” in its name, posts from that blog came up the most EVEN IF THE POST HAD NOTHING TO DO ABOUT ECOMMERCE! Such results are not the most helpful.

It would be helpful to break the search into two parts. Search blog content and search blogs titles. The former would be like a traditional search engine (which is how Google’s Blog Search currently acts (sort of)), the latter would return blogs that are more or less ABOUT the topic entered. I want to enter “ecommerce” and have each page be an unduplicated list of blogs that are ABOUT “ecommerce”. I guess that is why blog directories are more helpful in that regard.