SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

New! Google Blog Search

Not to be outdone by upstart competitors (Technorati, Blogdigger, Feedster, and more), Google has announced a beta-version of its blog search. This is still a baby-beta version: it covers blog content back only to June 2005 so far, although it's reasonable to expect that the coverage will increase as takeup of the product ramps up.

Unlike most Google search appliances, Google's Blog Search doesn't search the full text of blogs -- rather, it only searches the "feed" -- the part of the blog posting that an author sends out through an RSS feed. Most bloggers only send a short part of their blog posts through feeds, and as a result Google's blog search won't cover the parts that aren't fed. What's more, if a blog lacks a feed (through either RSS or Atom) Google's Blog Search won't index it at all.

Although this seems like a substantial problem for the moment, I expect that most bloggers will catch on to this and adjust their feed content to contain either fuller blog content or more carefully-crafted keywords in the feed content.

Google's Blog Search also provides its own RSS feed. That's not particularly novel, but with a tool of this size, it's a big plus for those of us who are trying to keep up to date in the ever changing web world. Just key in your search, then click the feed button to get feed link that you can plug into your newsreader of choice.

Google Tests Ads in Syndicated RSS Feeds

Although I've noticed that about 5 of the 100 or so RSS feeds that I follow now have ads in them, I'm expecting that number to inflate considerably now that Google has disclosed that it is testing the placement of ads in syndicated RSS feeds. (See yesterday's Industry Standard article for more on this.)

Too bad, because the great value of RSS has been non-existent ad noise. Given the great wealth of blogs (and bloggers who need some cash to compensate them for the time they waste re-posting the comments of others), this has the potential to be a significant new revenue stream for Google and other search engines that will race to compete.

The other interesting sidebar here is that Google, which is averse to disclosing anything significant in their development pipeline, only released the information on the RSS ad test after a blogger publicly posted details of his participation in the beta program.

Get Journal Contents by RSS Thru Ingenta Connect

Ingenta has launched a new service, IngentaConnect, which enables users to keep track of new contents of journal titles through an RSS feed. For those readers using a news aggregator, this is a great way to keep track of contents of new journal issues. Users can search by journal title, then click on the RSS button to display the feed for new issues of the journal. The RSS web URL can then be inserted into any aggregator, or fed to other RSS-friendly sources.

List of Library RSS Feeds

There has been a lot of interest in the last few months from libraries interested in using both weblogs and RSS feeds to promote their collections and services. However, for staff who aren't familiar with how RSS can be deployed, it's sometimes hard to understand how the technology can be beneficial.

So it's timely that a couple of lists of library-related weblogs have appeared. One, the list of library LSS feeds is arranged by topic and compiled by Gerry McKiernan of Iowa State University Library. Blog Without a Library by Amanda Etches-Johnson of McMaster University, has a long list of libraries with weblogs. Some of them have RSS feeds, but not all. Either of these sites are good ways to find models.

(corrected URL June 17 2004)