October 05, 2005
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.
May 18, 2005
If Weblogs have limited impact on public discourse, should we bother searching them?
As part of an online course that I teach on keeping current in library science, the class is asked to search and identify weblogs that are valuable for professional reading. It's amazing how uniform the class's feedback has been about how little most weblogs add to either knowledge or discourse. Most weblog watchers will agree that the VAST majority of weblogs (not just in library science, but pretty well any topic) simply restate news and information, without much analysis from individual weblog writers.
So it's particularly interesting that the latest research from Pew Internet, titled "BUZZ, BLOGS, AND BEYOND: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004" concurs with my students' informal findings. Despite the current buzz out there promoting blogs as the "new" journalism, and ascribing to bloggers the power to influence the world's take on events, Pew's findings suggest otherwise. Instead, the report suggests that any evidence that bloggers affect decision-makers is circumstantial; and that bloggers are as much "buzz-followers" as they are "buzz-makers".
Although this is early-stage research, the results beg the question -- should serious searchers bother searching the blog literature? Sure, there are a dozen or more blog search tools (e.g. Bloglines), and some meta-search tools (e.g. Clusty.com) are devoting parts of their meta-search tabs to blog search tools. But really, if the content is so lacklustre and barely differentiated from the other noise on the web, is blog searching worth the effort?