Google Blog Search

September 14, 2005 5:51 AM

Google Blog Search -- in beta, of course. Works by crawling blogs' RSS feeds. Should Technorati be nervous?
posted by mcwetboy (36 comments total)

Funny, first thing I did was search for 'crudcrud', which jonmc had pointed out last week or so and i thought was really cool, and guess what the first returned item was? jonmc's comment
posted by poppo at 5:56 AM on September 14, 2005

bad memory, it was from metachat rather than metafilter
posted by poppo at 5:57 AM on September 14, 2005

and, while i'm making a mess of things it actually does say in smaller print above the first returned item:

Related Blogs: CRUD CRUD - CRUD CRUD is a tour through the stacks of records, demo tapes, etc. that surround me. No recycled MP3s, CD tracks, or reissues here. Average...

I'll stop now
posted by poppo at 5:58 AM on September 14, 2005

Well it appears to be as crap as Technorati. Until they sort out some sort of tagging/registration system it will be crap, but when manual entry starts then the spamming will begin. It's a double edged sword covered in crap.
posted by fire&wings at 5:59 AM on September 14, 2005

The first search term(s) I put in was 'depraved indifference', which was the title of a post I made in my blog a few days ago. It showed up as the 3rd result. Thumbs up from me.
posted by pjern at 6:01 AM on September 14, 2005

Who uses these blog search engines anyway? How is this better than regular Google?

I'm asking because I want to know. Not to be snarky.
posted by sveskemus at 6:02 AM on September 14, 2005

I found excerpts from Livejournal posts when searching for an sf author, and when clicking the links the entries were protected. I wonder if those entries' status changed since being crawled - or something more sinister! ;-)
posted by LukeyBoy at 6:10 AM on September 14, 2005

LukeyBoy: Probably changed after a crawl. Your comment made me panic, so I searched for a few phrases from my protected posts, and it didn't find them, but it does find stuff from my few public ones.

And as far as this blog search goes, color me unimpressed.
posted by Orb at 6:22 AM on September 14, 2005

Should Technorati be nervous?

. . . nervous that people will actually read what they write?
posted by ToasT at 6:25 AM on September 14, 2005

How is this better than regular Google?

Not sure how it's better but since it "Works by crawling blogs' RSS feeds." it should be lead to a more exact search if you know what you're looking for is on a blog.

Using poppo's example of "crudcrud" and comparing the search on blog search with Google's normal search, you can see that a lot of ... um... non-blog noise is cut out.
posted by melt away at 6:28 AM on September 14, 2005

LukeyBoy: it does pick up locked Livejournal posts. I can see journals that I know are entirely Friends-locked using it.
posted by ninebelow at 6:32 AM on September 14, 2005

sveskemus: There are times when I want to find out what people have been saying about some software or what-not, then I'd want a blog search.

I'm actually looking forwards to the flip side of this. Assuming they now know what's blog and what isn't, I want Google searches where I can exclude all the blog results.
posted by RevDanCatt at 6:34 AM on September 14, 2005

Technoratti is toast, at least once Google gets this thing working a little better.
posted by caddis at 6:45 AM on September 14, 2005

I'd feel badly for Technorati if the damned thing ever worked.
posted by waldo at 9:19 AM on September 14, 2005

I keep seeing "mimimomo" from Japanese blogs. What does this mean in English?
posted by geoff. at 9:21 AM on September 14, 2005

Technoratti barely works. That is independent of whether google has a blog search tool or not.
posted by chunking express at 9:24 AM on September 14, 2005

Technorati's feelings on this development.
posted by peacay at 9:24 AM on September 14, 2005

sveskemus, I use blog searches for my work all the time to see what the blogging community is saying about the latest news from my company.

Technorati works decently well for me but they really should quit messing with it and get back to basics without all the fluffy window dressing.

And Google's Blog Search returned companies mentions that Technorati overlooked so I already like it better. So am I supposed to send my first born or second born child to Google as a sacrifice? Because I'm not sending my first born, he's far too cute.
posted by fenriq at 9:45 AM on September 14, 2005

Welcome to the Party, Google = We are fucked.

I thought Google buying Blogger validated the blogging phenemonon?
posted by fenriq at 9:48 AM on September 14, 2005

How is Flickr a blog?
posted by riffola at 9:56 AM on September 14, 2005

Interesting. It considers Flickr a blog. Many of the first hits on my name are for my pictures on Flickr.
posted by teece at 9:57 AM on September 14, 2005

Just searched for my favourite band and up popped my weblog at number two. Thumbs up from me then.
posted by brautigan at 10:03 AM on September 14, 2005

Hmmm... Almost all of my "vanity searches" were Flickr photos except a bunch of weird crap from Dadaist (WTF?) and, of all things, a post about Google Blogsearch.
posted by numlok at 10:08 AM on September 14, 2005

During the craziest parts of the Katrina fallout I used technorati quite a bit to try and find more information on obscure topics. It sort of worked once in a while, but it was weird to go use a search engine that wasn't Google. ... Now, I don't have to.
posted by blacklite at 10:10 AM on September 14, 2005

How is Flickr not a blog?
posted by basicchannel at 10:18 AM on September 14, 2005

It does seem to be excerpting some friends only posts, though unless you are logged in and have access, you can't read the full post. Still very annoying and wrong. It's really spotty though.

One of my friends has had a friends only journal for years now, and it has exactly one of her private posts listed ... and that's the only post at all for her. It didn't seem to find any of my private posts, but it found a slew of one of my other friend's. It looks to me like it catches plain old "friends only" but not posts that are further filtered into specific friends groups.

I pointed it out to someone who volunteers at LJ support, so maybe they can look into it. If it is only reading the RSS feeds, I don't see how it could be getting to the locked posts, as they don't show up in the feeds in any news reader I have ever used.
posted by Orb at 10:18 AM on September 14, 2005

I'm not sure why we need a blog-specific search tool, either. I think the tagging idea is a good one (or would be if Technorati worked better) in that the author generates the tags based on their own interpretation. Of course it's ripe for spamming, too. Then again, when I tried to search for "Rochester" in the Google tool, I got more spam blogs and LiveJournal hits than anything else.
posted by tommasz at 10:31 AM on September 14, 2005

It's not respecting the LiveJournal meta tags that block robots. I don't want to be indexed, damn it!
posted by exhilaration at 11:58 AM on September 14, 2005

blog based search is great for finding out who is linking to your site and why. It's also good for up-to-the-minute posts on things that are happening live. Say there is an earthquake in San Francisco-- I am sure that a blog search will find you up-to-the-minute posts from bloggers well before anything appears in the regular google index.
posted by cell divide at 12:19 PM on September 14, 2005

RIP Atom?
posted by adzm at 3:53 PM on September 14, 2005

Scary - works incredibly well. Had my blog up to the minute, with the most recent post first. Then again, I do use the Googleblogger, so it's probably ghosting my key strokes ghosting myy kkeeyy sssstttrrookkees.
posted by Jazznoisehere at 6:13 PM on September 14, 2005

Technorati always sucked slightly less than total suckage. Useless.

The whole 'Technorati Tags' thing was total buzzword bullshit, badly designed (Folksonomies don't work that way), and it never worked at all anyway.

It's an understatement to say that they had it coming.
posted by blasdelf at 9:04 PM on September 14, 2005

Goodbye Technorati, go for good!
posted by persia at 4:27 AM on September 15, 2005

It does seem to be excerpting some friends only posts, though unless you are logged in and have access, you can't read the full post. Still very annoying and wrong. It's really spotty though.

It pulls from LiveJournal's stream feed of their full latest posts RSS. Posts posted friends-only won't show up in there, but posts posted public and then switched to friends-only a moment later will, since it's the posting action itself that produces an entry in that feed. There were so many reports of friends-only posts showing up in LiveJournal's latest images feed that I'm inclined to think that there is some LiveJournal client that sets post security immediately after posting, instead of while posting. That said, if friends-only posts were actually being included you would see thousands more of them, so I doubt it's LiveJournal itself leaking them.

It's not respecting the LiveJournal meta tags that block robots.

It's not a web robot, it's a feed reader, and it's not coming near anything that contains meta tags that block robots. Apples and oranges. Someone aggregating your content is one of the potential outcomes of providing an RSS feed.
posted by mendel at 8:09 AM on September 15, 2005

I should add: The killer feature of this for me is the ability to limit it to your own blog. SiteSearch for Blogs!
posted by mendel at 8:11 AM on September 15, 2005

I've been waiting for this.
posted by spacewaitress at 1:47 PM on September 15, 2005