For those of you not aware of it, Yes, Google does offer a Blog Search product. Is it any good ? depends on your definition of what a good Blog Search Engine is supposed to be.
For me, when I use a Blog Search Engine as oppose to a general web search engine, I want to hear what bloggers are saying about a particular topic, I want it to be relatively recent and most importantly, I want it to be highly relevant !
To me, The Google Blog Search product suffers from the below problems:
- Forum Material! : I don’t know about the rest of the web community, when I search for blog material, I DON’T expect to see forum discussions in my results sets. Since Google Blog Search indexes RSS feeds, there are tones of forum entries and they represent a big part of the results sets regardless of what you search for.
- Irrelevant Content: Since Google Blog Search put a lot weighing in recent materials I believe the relevancy has suffered as a result, many Blog searches resulted in results in the first page that are complete rubbish.
It is a surprise to me that Google has not delivered on such an important area of search considering the expertise that it has and its investment in Blogger. I believe many people would use Blog Search to do transactional type of searches where they look for product reviews or user experience before committing to buying a new product or services. Best environment to place Adword and get a high conversion or click through rate !
So for my money, Google Blog Search is really pretty poor, particularly when you look at the high standard that has been set with the general Google web search engine. It is actually quite exciting to see a Google Product that has plenty of room for improvement.
So what are the alternatives ? Technorati has been the leader in Blog Search for a long time and the Technorati Authority has also been the equivalent of Google PageRank when it comes to ranking Blogs. When it comes to Blog Search according to how I see Blog Search should work, Technorati beats Google Blog Search hands down! I know that’s where I will be going when I want to find out what’s going on in the Blogsphere !
Go on, I know you don’t believe me, do a few search on Google Blog Search and Technorati and let me know what you think.
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