Google has relaunched its blog aggregation service, the not-so-popular-as-Techmeme Google Blog Search. Actually, it was just a minor upgrade, with the new home page now showing categories on the left side.
These categories then cluster the blog posts indexed by Google according to their subject contents. So when you view the Technology category, you’ll see the list of blog articles written on specific news or events grouped together, similar to how Google News presents news stories. When you click on a particular blog items, you will be brought to a new page where all the blogs covering the particular item are listed. Within the new page, you’ll also see a graph which tells you how many blogs are covering the news or events over a particular timeline.
Of course when we talked about blog aggregation service, we can’t help but think about Techmeme and comparing it Google Blog Search is inevitable. Read and Write’s Marshall Kirkpatrick thinks that the new Google Blog Search might be a Techmeme Killer for the simple reason that it is faster than Techmeme and it indexes a large number of blogs as compared to Techmeme’s limited scope.
Unfortunately, there lies a possible problem with Google Blog Search. Techmeme serves as a noise fitering mechanism for the blogosphere. The fact that Techmeme is limited to the more prominent blogs is also one of its advantages.
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.
Going back to the revamped Google Blog Search, while checking out one of the top stories on “Apple drops NDA for iPhone developers”, I noticed that some sites/blogs listed in the Google Blog Search are also included in the Google News stream. jkOntheRun’s post about the the news event was listed in both Google News stream and Google Blog search. Although I would be inclined to think that jkOntheRun is more of a blog than a news site. This led me to question, how does Google Blog Search really determine whether a site is a “news” site or a “blog” site?
If Google Blog Search wants to serve as a noise filtering service for the blogosphere, it must be clear on how to determine which sites should be included in the Google News stream and which should be displayed in the Google Blog Search stream. Otherwise, it will defeat its purpose.
