Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Google Blog Search

If there is one thing every blogger can be guaranteed to blog about over the next couple of days its the new Google Blog Search engine. I guess it was inevitable that they would launch a blog search tool. Technorati and the likes must have dreaded this day.

Google search it in beta at the moment but it seems to be fully functional, or at least as fully functional as Google gets with its simple, no nonsense, interface. I don't know what way the search engine ranks results but to a certain extent the results seem to be grouped by blog. Searching for "Rip Off Republic" Google returned 101 entries. ("George Bush" returned 322,533). I found my 8 blog entries that mentioned "Rip off Republic" in the title all grouped together (on page 9) but three other entries that just mention "Rip off Republic"were separated from the others by other peoples blog entries. 2 of my entries were 100 and 101, so I guess I've a bit of work to do to improve my Google "relevance" rating.

Google do have a Web Crawler which you can add URLs to. I chanced my arm and added my blog url to it. I'll see if that improves my rankings tomorrow, though I doubt it.

I got quite a few visits from searches on Technorati, which was sorted by date. On Technorati the search for "Rip Off Republic" gives 69 results, my latest one being on page 1. Google by default is sorted by relevance, so its alot harder to know how this will impact on blog traffic. I don't know how Google decides which blog entries are more relevant than others, but I imagine some people will be happy, some wont be.

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