Today Hugh over at gapingvoid posted about Google’s new blog search, with the headline: well, this changes everything. So I start to wonder, how does this change everything?
I did a couple of searches based on some of my posts, and found that I was coming in fairly highly when I did specific terms like "anonymous blogs" and "character blogs" — things I’ve written about recently and/or often. In fact on the term anonymous blogs I was number 1 (which will last for a nanosecond I’m sure). So I did the same search on regular Google, and my post shows up nowhere, Or at least not in the first 21 results pages 🙂
Now, if you read the fine print on the About Google Blog Search, they clearly state that results should be pretty good for anything from June 2005, when they started building the database, and they are trying to add in older stuff. I have a Typepad hosted blog, and I’m sure they sucked up those blogs right away, which explains why my older stuff is in there.
Here’s my question — now that Google has a blog search, how are they going to treat blogs in regular search over time? Will they continue to have the same weight? No small number of search engine optimization plans rely on blogs lifting the relevance of the corporate website; it’s a benefit of a blog that is often mistakenly used as a reason for a blog.
If the regular Google algorithm still gives weight to blogs, shouldn’t a blog that ranks highly in the blog search for a term show up a bit sooner in the regular search? Or is the reason that my post is not in the top results for the term on regular search, is that my blog IS on Typepad, and therefore most definitely a blog, and not a "website with an RSS feed?"
If that’s the case, what will that mean for the hosted services? And will it marginalize blogs, and bloggers, that rely on the hosted services to participate in the conversation by creating a blog ghetto of sorts. You know what I mean: the regular search is where the validated information is, and the blog search is where you go for those "blog things." Will we then have a whole NEW industry spring up to help blogs get into both regular search and blog search?
I’m not a search engine expert by any means, and I have no idea how all of this is working "under the hood," I’m just curious…..
But it seems to me that Hugh is right — this will change everything. I’m just not sure we know how…..
UPDATE 15 Sept.: So, the good news is that people who really dig into all this search stuff seem to think that Google’s blog search is pretty good. I’ll believe that — heck it put some of my posts toward the top, and that’s bound to bring some readers my way. I’m still concerned/curious about how all this is going to play out for both businesses and the user experience. Bear with me as I think out loud.
Question one: Are these blog search engines or RSS search engines? They are not synonymous. Most, probably all blogs provide an RSS feed, but not all RSS feeds are blogs.
If they are blog search engines, I wonder how you (or an algorithm) can really tell whether the "thing" is a blog, since we have a fair amount of disagreement about what a blog is anyway. And as I commented yesterday (above) if we have some search engines for blogs and other search engines for other information, how does that change the nature of our research. Which will be deemed more credible and why?
If they are RSS search engines, how does that change the user experience of using web sites. Iam a big proponent of RSS feeds on company websites. Used appropriately. If the only way to show up in these new search engines is to deliver an RSS feed, will companies start junking up the net with RSS feeds of EVERYTHING on their site?
What I’d really like to see is an integrated search where the type of content is clearly marked, ie this seems to be a blog or this is likely to be a website. If you want to restrict a search to one form or another, you can, but the search engine will tell you if it finds more apparently relevant information in another category.
Seems to me that if anybody could pull this off, it would be Google. And, yeah, that really would change everything.