More on Google’s Blog Search

September 15th, 2005

There has been quite a lot of talk about Google’s Blog Search over the past day including speculation and further rumours.

Google to remove blogs from main index?

Beyond PR asks if Google Blog Search means the end of blogger’s influence. The entry cites an article from The Register:

CEO Eric Schmidt made the announcement on Monday, at the JP Morgan Technology and Telecom conference. ‘Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as “blogs,”‘ reported Reuters.

It isn’t clear if weblogs will be removed from the main search results, but precedent suggests they will be. After Google acquired Usenet groups from Deja.com, it developed a unique user interface and a refined search engine, and removed the groups from the main index. After a sticky start, Usenet veterans welcomed the new interface. Google recently acquired Blogger, and sources suggest this is the most likely option.

I guess this might be a good thing, but blogs are also often used for useful information. I’ve actually found when searching for a solution to a web development problem, most of the time a blog has the solution. It would be interesting to see how this proceeds.

Redirects

Quite a lot of people have been complaining about the links to http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.example.com in the search results. Blogger Buzz responds:

“After clicking on a result in Blog Search, I’m being passed through a redirect. Why?”

Sadly, this wasn’t part of an overly clever click-harvesting scheme. We had the redirects in place during testing to prevent referrer-leaking and simply didn’t remove them prior to launch. But they should be gone in the next 24 hours … which will have the advantage of improving click-through time.