Google Launches a Blog Search

Google's now on the blog search bandwagon with Google Blog Search at http://google.com/blogsearch . There are good things about it and bad things.

It starts off with the regular minimalist Google interface we've all come to know and love. Enter a search. Google will give you first blogs that match your query, and then blog entries. (It looks like the maximum number of related 'blogs is five.)

Results are initially listed in order of relevance. ARGH. C'mon, you've got a set of data you can actually accurately sort by date, SORT IT BY DATE ALREADY. It is an option on the right, but it should be the default. (Especially if you're going to promote this new search using sentences like "That way you can find commentary on breaking news as it's being created by millions of individuals.")

Search results include post title, snippet, and URL -- no caches. Interesting. Down at the bottom of the screen you can get RSS or Atom feeds of the results, either 10 or 100 at a time. (You can change this to between 1 and 100 results by generating the output feed and then changing the &num=xx switch in the URL, where xx is the number of items you want in the feed.)

(By the way, the RSS output switch for the result URL is &output=rss. When I stuck that on the end of a regular Google Web search I didn't get RSS output, though it did work for Google News searches. Stay tuned.)

Google has an impressive advanced search for their blog search, which Feedster should take a look at. You can search by blog title (special syntax inblogtitle: ) or post title (special syntax inposttitle: ). You can limit your searches to particular URLs. There's also syntax to limit results by date -- either a particular set of dates or a time span (last 6 hours, last 12 hours, etc.) It's about time that someone took the delineation offered by RSS feeds and made a nice advanced search out of it. I'm sure this is only the beginning.

Some of the regular Google syntax work as well -- intitle: works, though it seems to find the same results as inposttitle:. Link: will allow you to find posts that link to a particular page. The site: syntax works. Inurl: works. Unfortunately Google Blog search seems to have a ten-word query limit, unlike the regular Google Web search.

I thought that maybe I could get around that by applying the Google Blog special syntax to the regular Web search, but I didn't get anywhere; though you get different counts with inblogtitle: and inposttitle: when you search Google's Web search, I can't tell what the difference is. It looks like maybe it's defaulting to an intitle: search.

I found the coverage here to be quite good. My only concern is that there's already a lot of blogspam in the results. Feedster's got a good hold on getting this gunk out of their search results; Google will have to do the same thing. With the Atom and RSS feeds and the extensive coverage right out of the gate (and some nifty syntax!), this one is going in my tool box.

Posted to Search Engines-Google | TrackBack