Google relaunches Blog Search

Google has broadened the scope of its Blog Search tool, which was previously a straightforward blog-focused search engine. From today it looks more like Google News than the Google homepage. It picks up the most active stories in the blogosphere and displays them in Google News format, with a paragraph of teaser text from the main source and multiple links to other sites that reference the story.

Several web commentators noted that the new site would compete with Techmeme, and to an extent it will. But where Techmeme focuses on technology news, Blog Search is casting its web more widely: three of the current top four stories relate to the US vice-presidential debate (the fourth, comfortingly, is about Nintendo's new DS).

Here's what the web had to say about Google's update:

The Official Google Blog:

Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

Michael Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb:

Even in tech, though we may love Techmeme - it's audience is more influential than it is large. The new Google Blogsearch has the potential to reach tens of millions of people and drive insane amounts of traffic.

Techmeme indexes a limited number of tech blogs, primarily blogs linked-to by other blogs that are already indexed. Google Blogsearch, on the other hand, indexes all blog posts faster than anyone else on the web.

Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch:

At this point it’s too early to tell if Google Blogsearch will be more useful than any of the other memetrackers (or if it’s even in the same league). Much of its utility will lie in how often the listings are updated, how many sources it pays attention to, and how it assesses a blog’s credibility - a memetracker is only as good as the stories it presents.

Arnold Zafra on Search Engine Journal:

And where does all this leave another blog aggregator, Technorati? Well, the good news is, Google Blog Search does not really cover every single posts made by every single blogs  in the blogosphere. It still depends on how prominent and widely read a blog is, before it gets indexed by Google Blog Search. And there lies Technorati’s strenght. For bloggers who want to gain audience and get listed in a blog aggregator’s service, they can always turn to Technorati.

Adam Ostrow on Mashable!:

While by no means a revolutionary product, Google’s inevitable entry into blog tracking is not good news for Technorati, especially considering most users already don’t even notice when the site goes down. On the other hand, for TechMeme and its family of websites (WeSmirch, Memeorandum, and Ballbug), the combination of both mainstream news source and blogs is still unique, and will likely continue to yield slightly different results than trackers based solely on one or the other.

Comments

[rob, BtG]

a good study on available blog trackers-

http://www.blogtogreat.com/2008/10/blog-trackers-.html

[Jon Moss]

Google needed to do this - blogs are more influential than ever and becoming more widely accepted.

Rock on Blogging!

[Nobby Clark]

I bet it only looks at Google's blogs though, rather than blog.com, blog.co.uk etc.