The new Google Blog Search is live and you can start playing with it. It’s not quite as comprehensive as Technorati but no doubt it will continue to improve as Google indexes more blogs.
I did some tests of my sites and one thing I noticed was the Google sandbox is having a strong effect on this site (or at least I presume it is), which makes me wonder how deep in the sandbox this site is for general web search (here’s hoping in a few months time when this site rises out of the sandbox I get a huge influx of search traffic). My other blog, The Official BetterEdit Blog, where this blog was born, is well indexed and showed up for many search terms I used trying to find this blog. The old blog has a lot fewer backlinks and lower quality backlinks in a PageRank sense than this blog does, but since it’s hosted on a domain that is nearly five years old it’s showing up well in the results and isn’t very sandy at all.
The Google blog search results are very “fresh” and act much like the Google News service that provides live news reporting by collecting headlines from news authority sites around the web. No doubt Google is using its ranking algorithms to give relevancy weighting to blog search results in a similar manner to what it uses for all of its search services.
An example of this is when conducting a search for the title of one my recent articles How To Sell A Website the first result was Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities Weblog where he linked to my article. Dane’s site has a PageRank 6 so is the top result for this search while my article doesn’t show up in the blog search results at all, but was the first result at Technorati.
Another excellent feature of the Google blog search is the ability to subscribe to the feeds of any search phrase you use. By doing this you can keep up to date using RSS syndication to follow the top 10 or top 100 results on the latest news around the blogosphere for any particular topic.
to improve on Technorati, google just needs to weed out the spam blogs. This tends to devalue Technorati results
Hmm.. I notice it hasn’t indexed ANYTHING from myweblog.com, maybe it indexes things based on RSS? since it figures any ‘real’ blog would have RSS? Bad assumption. Now I gotta make RSS work.
Yeah, a quick test and it’s doing its job okay – for me at least
I’m just worried when the spammers get a hold of it – hopefully Google have thought this out and will combat it, although Technorati have failed to so …
Also love the rss feature – already helping me to better monitor various topics and have already found new sites/blogs I’ve never heard of so that’s a good thing.