Web Marketing Strategy Update

Google has launched a dedicated [blog search service->http://google.com/blogsearch]. From the [FAQ->http://www.google.com/help/about_blogsearch.html]:

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves.

Blog Search indexes blogs by their site feeds, which will be checked frequently for new content. This means that Blog Search results for a given blog will update with new content much faster than standard web searches. Also, because of the structured data within site feeds, it is possible to find precise posts and date ranges with much greater accuracy.

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.

Chris Sherman at [Searchenginewatch->http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3548411] writes:

Google blog search scans content posted to blogs and feeds in virtually real-time, according to Jason Goldman, Google product manager for blog search.

“We look for sites that update pinging services, and then we crawl in real-time so that we can serve up search results that are as fresh as we can,” said Goldman.

Google defines blogs as sites that use RSS and other structured feeds and update content on a regular basis…

Google’s blog search indexes all of the content it finds in feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher’s web server.

Google does use information garnered from its crawl of the web to identify potential blog sources, looking at meta data, links and other clues that might point to a feed. However, Google also respects the robots.txt protocol, and will not crawl any content that’s disallowed by a publisher….

Goldman says that while blog search uses its own unique approach to relevance ranking, it also draws a lot from Google’s web search ranking algorithms….

You can also discover who’s linking to a post or blog using the link: command. Unlike Google web search, which sharply curtails the number of results displayed using link: command to discourage abuse by search marketers, the link: command in blog search displays a comprehensive and nearly complete list of sources linking to a particular post or blog.

You can also save a blog search as an alert that gets updated any time new content is posted matching you query. Google blog search allows you to issue a query and then subscribe to that query via your RSS feed reader, with either 10 or 100 results being displayed.

I’m sure they’ll be plenty more [posts, comments->http://google.com/blogsearch?q=google+blog+search] and [other mentions->http://www.google.com/search?q=Google+Blog+Search] over the next few days if you want to know more.

Personally I like it. There’s still quite a bit of spam in the results, but that’s likely to improve and is the same in all the blog search services anyway. However, unlike most of the others I’ve used (which for me made blog searching a tedious business), Google’s is blazing fast and the results pretty good in terms of relevancy.