Today Google launched a blog search engine today. It gathers blogs from pings sent to weblogs.com and puts them all in quite a nice search engine. It gathers from spidering. Also, it is possible to search from within Blogger – and now on the Blogger homepage it displays the latest updated blogs, also the Blogger navbar has an option to search all blogs now.
Google Blog Search also fully respects robots.txt and nofollow/noindex meta tags, if you don’t want your site listed. Currently, Google Blog Search is indexing posts back to around June, or the time at which you submitted your blog for inclusion. Google says it’s working on ways to include earlier posts.
Blog Search also adds extra search operators (nifty things you can do…) like inblogtitle:, inposttitle:, inpostauthor:, blogurl: clever things you can do with these is search for blog authors, or even a post about trainspotting by a man named Bill! (why, I have yet to know). It is also possible to restrict the results to one of 35 languages on top of that SafeSearch is supported.
Another feature is that you can subscribe to searches as RSS/Atom feeds. Most engines do this, interesting.
What interests me is how Google is so late into all new technologies; only releasing a VoIP tool recently for example. Even Ask Jeeves beat Google in blog searching, with the searchable Bloglines. At the moment, Google Blog Search is on the Google Homepage – but when it reaches there Google will get the blog searching menu, right from Technorati.
One interesting thing is Google currently isn’t serving ads, so what advantage does this service have to them? Perhaps it will provide Google with better statistics, or perhaps as it’s beta they will not put ads in. I hope it stays that way, I also hope Google provides the stats publicly like the Zeitgeist, but I hope it will be instant. Then again, I support companies like Technorati over faceless mutli-national ones like Google.
Perhaps this move will shape The Web 2, and see if old big companies will remain dominant. It will be interesting to see progress.
