Is that a statement from Google that it will never be adopted?

I do like the new operators.

Huh? What the heck is the point of Google Blogsearch?

The first question I had was “Is anybody going to use this?”. I think the answer is a pretty definite “No”, although there may be rare occasions when you’d want to. But that brings us to the next question: wouldn’t this be just as well served by adding “Sort by date, most recent first” and “Only show rss enabled sites” (which could be bundled into a -blog flag if you like) to ordinary Google?

What the heck is a blog anyway? Is it still a blog if you haven’t updated it in months? Apparently Google sometimes thinks so, but I sure don’t. Does a blog HAVE to have rss? I’d say no – it’s better for everyone if you do, but I don’t see that as part of the definition.

In reality, blogs are whatever people think they are. I had someone insist the none of my sites are actually blogs because they are all “techy”. So, in that person’s mind, I have to talk about my personal life to qualify as a blog. Fine, but of my six sites, I consider four to be blogs because they are focused on specific subjects and I write original content for them daily. If I were only providing links at a site, I wouldn’t consider that a blog no matter how often it is updated, but other folks have different feelings about that, too.

In short, I thing the whole “blog” thing is too ill-defined to bother with a “blog” specific search engine. I predict it will be a seldom used feature that eventually disappears.

When I searched for one of my blogs, I was gently reminded that an image cannot be your title. The actual title of one of my blogs came up on another site with a lower page rank because my title is NOT ON MY PAGE. What the heck was I thinking? Ugh.

I know better. Moron.

Martin – If anyone can tell me that I can use SSI to pull in ads with blogging software I would change – but at the moment I haven’t had time to do any experimenting myself.

Right now, there’s a lot of seaweed out there (I tried “roofing contractor” Des Moines and couldn’t find a legitmate blog), but I think that will get cleaned up.

strange how your search came up with my little post about me being sick (although that post did include a link to one of your articles/post – which must explain it.)

For me, it’s working fairly good. A search on “homeofficevoice” brings up most results I’d expect.

A search on one of my main keyword phrases shows nothing from me for at least 20 pages (which is no good – gotta work on that) except a link to me on the related blogs (which is quite nice seeing that it’s above the fold and quite clear).

I too see spam as being a real issue here once all those blackhaters get goinig.

Also, the rss feature is a great inititative.

Still, gotta wait and see over coming weeks – all we want is relevancy when searching, hopefully Google has been working on it. If it turns into a spam fest then it’s a wasted tool.

As far as I know it seems that if you start generating one you’ll get google to index your site as well :)

A search for “home office guide” complete with the inverted commas turns up a post from Martin’s Home Office Voice where he laments that he’s feeling unwell.

Could it be that they are only recognised blogs that actually use blog software?

I’ll also be fascinated to see how this impacts blog’s search result positioning in the main Google index. Will it lead to them being indexed faster and higher? Or is this a step towards downgrading their importance in the main index.

I think blogs will stay the same in the main index as they are now. IMO, this blogsearch is Google’s way of indexing the ‘live web’ more quickly so time sensitive content will now show up within minutes rather than a couple of days.

The blogsearch is more ‘time relevant’ than the regular search results.