My Month-long Google Products Experiment: Google Blog Search

Last week I was the lucky winner of a back operation that I needed to take care of a few herniated disks.  This left we with some time on my hands as the doctor advised against much vigorous activity.   That and the operation itself left me to build my own pulpit to talk about what’s on my mind.  My idea was to take a different Google Product each day and try to use it throughout the day to see if it was something I wanted to continue doing.  Sort of a daily challenge.  The last episode had me reviewing Google’s Alert tool which I found to be more intriguing than I had first thought and may be a tool I add to my permanent arsenal.

In this continuing webisode of my experiences using Google Products for a month I’ll be looking at Google’s Blog Search.  At first glance the Blog Search seems pretty much like a non-event.  It appears to be just Google Search and Google News mashed up.  However to do my due diligence in reviewing the tool I tried one of my favorite search terms. Call  me narcissistic but who doesn’t like to Google oneself?  I tried the term Utah Semantic Markup.  Remember the old adage that you never try something in a demo that you haven’t done before.  Alternatively you never ask a question that you don’t know how the person will answer.  Well, I thought I knew the answer to this question but was surprised.

When I did a Blog search for the Utah Semantic Markup term I saw none of the results I expected.  I wasn’t there, even though I’d spent countless hours designing and developing my site to be the premier site for semantic markup in Utah.  At this point I knew they must be querying different datasources as I was no where to be found.  Kudos goes to Google for putting a Web Search right next to the Blog Search so you can see the differences.  A quick search for Utah Semantic Markup sure enough showed Half Nut Development as the top result in my Google Search.

Now I know Google knows about my blog as it’s rescued me several times before I found a good back-up tool, but the search didn’t seem to know about me.  I then searched for some documentation as to just what is being indexed in the Google Blog Search.

At the bottom of the first search page is a link for documentation or about the Google Blog Search.  In this document there is a FAQ that asks my question which was what blogs are being indexed?  Google says, “The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.”

Not having been a big fan of RSS feeds I don’t have one on my site.  This also tells me why my results aren’t showing up in the Blog Search.  In essence I’m missing out on any searches done with Google Blog Search.  In order to  fix this I made a mental note to setup my RSS feed in Wordpress.  I also found a simpler more lazy option which works for me as a programmer. I can go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping to manually add my site to the search.  Now the test will be how long will it take to index my blog.  If past results are any indicator then I expect to have it within the week if not sooner.

As mentioned above much of the content we have or want to wade through may seem trivial but one feature of the Google Blog Search helps to filter the data we must slosh through.  They have links on the left-hand side to filter content according to time, by the last hour, last 12 hours, last day, week, month or anytime.  Alternatively you can choose a specific date range with the help of a handy pop-up calendar.

Overall Grade: C

Pros: Great at limiting search to blog content only.

Cons: I think the reasons why the tool is good is also the reason why I wouldn’t use the product.  How often would I mentally say I just want to search blog content.  This is the opposite of what I expect when I come to Google or any other search engine.  I want it to find what I’m looking for regardless of where it’s at.  I understand for Google and from a technology standpoint it makes sense to filter the content to reduce the quantity of content to search through, but it will take a great user interface to make it usable by the masses.