July 30, 2007

Latest From Google Blogs: Dead Links and Foreign Languages

I went through the various Google blogs and found little added content so far this week. Guess Mondays get a little busy at Google... I know it is the worse day to contact my PPC rep.

So what did I come across? Well at AdSense they have added two more Eastern European languages: Bulgarian and Serbian.

While over at AdWords blog the link offering info on optimization tips seems to be dead... well at least it is just redirecting to the home page.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:00 PM | Permalink

March 20, 2007

Google Blog Search patent application reveals keys to ranking

Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea reports that a patent application for Google Blog Search reveals some of the factors that can impact ranking. The two major factors are the relevance of the post, based upon the query used by a searcher, and a blog's quality score, which is independent of the query terms used in the search. Good eye, Bill.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:38 AM | Permalink

March 12, 2007

Google News adds feature from Google Blog Search

Google Operating System shows some screen shots that it calls, "Another Step towards Google News - Blog Search Integration." Adding a feature in the left sidebar may or may not be a prelude to integration, but it does raise an interesting question. If mainstream media keep adding blogs and A-List bloggers keep becoming columnists for mainstream media, what is the difference long-term between news search and blog search?

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 8:04 AM | Permalink

January 4, 2007

Has Google mastered shameless self-promotion?

UPDATE: Google drops self-promting tips. See below...

Riva Richmond of The Wall Street Journal has posted a column on MoneyWeb entitled "Google steps up self promotion." She writes, "Google Inc. may finally have learned how to promote itself without compromising its principles. Like its own legions of advertisers, it is marketing its products on Google.com."

According to Hitwise, traffic to Google's Blog Search more than doubled over a two-week period in October after Google put a link to the service on the Google News homepage. About 60% of the upstream traff Google Blog Search has come directly from Google News since then, compared with 1% before the change, Hitwise says.

Can we expect to see more "shameless self-promotion" from other Google services in 2007?

Update: Google stopped run these ads on Tuesday, according to MarketWatch.com.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 11:44 AM | Permalink

December 28, 2006

Google's blog search engine takes over top slot

Ben Charny of MarketWatch reports that Google's blog search engine has climbed to the top of the category rankings.

According to Hitwise data, Google Blog Search's market share jumped to a market-leading 25% recorded last week, leapfrogging Technorati, which had been the leading blog search engine.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 4:38 PM | Permalink

November 24, 2006

Google Blog Results Search Creep

Andy Boyd found Google testing blog search results at the bottom of the Google search results. He posted a screen capture here, as you can see, it is fairly similar to how they have integrated news archive results into Google search.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:52 AM | Permalink

October 26, 2006

Google Helping Racism By Refusing To Take Down Hosted Blogs

The Inquirer reports that Google refuses to tackle racist blogs hosted on Google's Blogger platform. These blogs have racist and neo-Nazi content on them from organizations based in New Zealand and Australia. Brian Stokes, co-founder of FightDemBack!, said that most of the time when his organization reports these types of sites to Angelfire and Tripod, he gets a response. But Google has not responded to his requests and flags. There are more details on this at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:38 AM | Permalink

October 24, 2006

Google News Adds Link To Google Blog Search

Google News has added a link on the top right of the home page to Google Blog Search. Also, if you do a search on anything at Google News, such as [google custom search engine] you will see at the bottom of the results, "New! More ways to find the latest on google custom search engine:" and a link to "Search blogs."

Here is an image of the Google News home page highlighting that link:

Yahoo removed blog search results from Yahoo News a while back and we have never heard about it since. Yahoo?

Other coverage of this at Techcrunch, Inside Google, and Matt Cutts.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:38 AM | Permalink

October 5, 2006

Google Blog Search Adds Ping Support

The Google Blog announced that Google Blog Search now supports the acceptance of pings. So when you add a new blog entry and you support RSS/XML/Atom you can send Google Blog Search a ping at their Blog Search Pinging Service. How do you do this? Well, you can read more at About Google Blog Search Pinging Service and view the Pinging API yourself. I tested it out on a different blog and got a 404, but it is very possible I pinged the wrong URL, I will test it again shortly.

Postscript From Danny:

Movable Type users want to put this: http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 into the "Others" box in the "Notify the following sites upon weblog updates" section of "New Entry Default Settings."

WordPress users, go to Options, Writing Options, the paste that line into your Update Services box.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 12:45 PM | Permalink

July 3, 2006

Google's Non Search Products A Flop

BusinessWeek reports that when Google launches a new non-search product, the competition "shivers," Google has yet to lead in market share for any of those non-search products. Google's Gtalk is currently ranked number ten with two percent market share, Google Finance is the "40th-most-visited finance site," and Gmail "is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail." So with all these product launches, is Google a threat? Read more at BusinessWeek.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:18 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2006

Google Blog Search Adds Time Based Filtering

Spotted over at SEOMoz, Google Blog Search has added, what seems to be new, a way to filter results by date range. If you so a search on any keyword, for example google, you will notice on the left hand side, there are options labeled "Published." You can filter results by published within the last hour, last 12 hours, last day, past week, past month, anytime or you can choose your dates. You can also sort by relevance or by date, a feature added by Google Scholar recently.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 4:28 PM | Permalink

March 30, 2006

Optimize Your Blog For Google Finance

Danny mentioned in his write-up on Google Finance that it shows both Google News results and Google Blog Search results on the stock results landing page. Now Seth Finkelstein offers a few tips on perhaps enhancing your chances of showing up for a stock search in the blog posts section of Google Finance. The basics are to use the full company name in your blog title, and you have a pretty good shot of being included on the page.

For more information on Google Blog Search, see here. Plus look at Thoughts On & Poking At Google Blog Search to understand there's even a chance a blog might be in news search and blog search.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 11:29 AM | Permalink

February 15, 2006

Google Acquires Blog Tracking Software, Measure Map

Google announced that they have acquired Measure Map, a blog tracking software product. This product "helps you understand what people do at your blog, and what influence you are having on the world." I haven't tried the product, but reportedly, it is easy to set up and gives you information that you want to see, quickly. Some of the information includes number of visitors, number of links to your blog, number of comments and number of blog entries views out of the ones posted.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:50 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Google Feed API Coming

Run or building a feed reader? Google's planning a feed reader API, confirms Technorati's Niall Kennedy. He's got more details in Exclusive: Google to offer feed API. It's not clear to me whether this means tapping into data used for Google Blog Search or data that Google Reader develops for its own use or some combination of them both. But I'm sure more details will emerge.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:12 AM | Permalink

December 15, 2005

Google Firefox Extensions For Anti-Phishing & Popping-Up Google Blog Search Results

New Firefox extensions over at Google highlights that there's a new anti-phishing tool now out for Firefox users plus a new add-on that lets you see what people are saying about pages you visit through Google Blog Search.

Google Safe Browsing for Firefox is the anti-phishing tool, similar to the Phishing Filter Add-In for Internet Explorer with the MSN Search Toolbar. More about that in our past post, TrustWatch & MSN Offer Anti-Phishing Tools To Searchers & Surfers.

Blogger Web Comments is the Firefox extension to show you what people are blogging about relating to pages you are viewing.

What happens is that when you go to a particular page, a little window pops-up in the lower right-hand corner of your screen. It will show you a comment from someone on a blog that's linking to the page you are viewing. You can also click to see more "comments," which is a handy way to check what people are blogging about the page you are reading.

These are NOT just people using Blogger that are commenting via blogs. Instead, what Google's doing is simply generating a backlink lookup on Google Blog Search and showing you the summary of the first thing listed on that page.

For example, here are the backlinks to the Search Engine Watch home page. The first thing on that page at the moment is:

Google Adds Music Search Feature 33 minutes ago by Bruce Houghton GoogleGoogle this morning added a music search feature to it's popular search engine. Type in for example "Pink Floyd" and the top result featured includes a photo of the artist, a bit of information, and a link to "More music results ... hypebot - http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/

In my pop-up box, that got turned into:

hypebot GoogleGoogle this morning added a music search feature to it's popular search engine. Type in for...

You can also use the "Add comment" link in the pop-up box to add your own comments about the page. What this really does is send you to your own Blogger-based blog (or suggests you open one). But to "comment," you simply need to have a page that shows up in Google Blog Search that links to the page someone is viewing. Remember, however, that over time your "comment" will drop down the list.

More about Google Blog Search is covered in our past articles, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search and Thoughts On & Poking At Google Blog Search.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:28 AM | Permalink

October 7, 2005

First Fast Impressions of Google Reader

I haven't had much time to "play" with the new Google Reader from Google Labs (beta) but here are a few VERY fast impressions, things I'm suprised not to see from the outset, and other things I would love to see in future releases. One thing is for sure, competition is almost always good for the searcher and it will be interesting and likely exciting to see what Bloglines, My Yahoo, and other web-based readers offer in their next releases.

+ Given that Google is a "search company?", I'm surprised that you're not able to only search content from your selected feeds. Bloglines does offer this feature.

+ No advertising on any pages. Is advertising coming?

+ Since it's all about sharing, what about being able to easily share individual posts with non-Gmail users?

+ Since Google is a global company (and beyond) I would have expected to see at least a few interfaces in a few non-English languages from the outset. Yes, it's a beta, I know.

+ I would appreciate an option to add feeds to my Google Reader directly from Google Blog Search. The same goes for feeds from specific news sources from Google News (assuming feeds are available).

+ I hope Google will eventually offer a mobile version of its reader. This is one of the primary ways I interact with feeds. My Yahoo feeds are available via My Yahoo mobile. Bloglines also offers a mobile version.

+ Let's see, I can have feeds in my Google Sidebar, on my Google Personalized home page, and now in my Google Reader. How about a way to unify my subscriptions and also what I've seen/read with all three tools.

+ The default sort of articles is by relevance. Google defines it this way, "[Google Reader will] guess what's most relevant to you based on how you use Google Reader (such as which items you decide to actually read). Btw, Findory launched a personalized feed reader a few weeks ago. More about that here. If sorting by time is more important to me, I can't seem to find a way to change the permanently change the default to time.

+ Options to change default font and point size.

+ A tool/widget to notify when new headlines become available. We've been told that one is likely to be available soon.

+ The chance to use Feed Reader with the Opera browser. At the moment, it's a no go.

+ Searching for new content. MSNBC offers 19 feeds but a search for "MSNBC" only shows 4 feeds. Yes, more are available when including other terms but a basic search should show all possible results.

+ How about spell check when searching for new content. A typo for "search engine rondtable" offers no suggested spellings/corrections.

+ More documentation via the FAQ. (Thanks to those who helped me access it. Some did say it was difficult to find.)

Postscript: Very cool, I must say. You can listen to podcasts/MP3 material directly from the Google Reader.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:11 PM | Permalink

New Google Reader For Feed Reading

Continuing its push into the universe of blogs and feeds, Google has launched a feed reader application. Google Reader is a browser-based application that works with virtually all popular browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Google Reader is "the most comprehensive feed finder available," said Jason Shellen, the Google product manager who spearheaded the development of the program. Comprehensive, yes, but Reader also adheres to Google's trademark simple, easy-to-use design philosophy. "We're trying to find an easier find and subscribe model for feeds," said Shellen.

The program features a Google search box at the top which allows you to search for feeds or do an entire web search. Like most other feed readers out there, Google reader has two panes. The left side displays your reading list and the feeds you've subscribed to, and a preview pane on the right allows you to read feed content.

Content can be displayed by relevance or date. Reader also employs algorithms that learn your content preferences and prioritizes content accordingly. This is similar to the auto-discovery feature for news that's part of the Google Sidebar.

Built-in sharing capabilities allow you to email feeds through your Gmail account, or post content to a blog (currently this only works on Google's Blogger-powered blogs). Don't have a Gmail account yet? If you're in the U.S. and have a SMS capable phone, you can sign up for an account by following these instructions.

Google allows you to import your feed subscriptions from other readers, and provide an export mechanism so you can move your Reader subscriptions to another feed reader.

Google just announced the Reader at the Web 2.0 conference, so I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet. I did get a demo of the program last August when I visited Google, and was impressed with what I saw at the time—particularly with the auto-discovery feature that recommended feed content based on what you read. Findory offers a similar service for feeds.

To get Google Reader, visit google.com/reader.

Gary is busy playing with Reader and will post his comments on the program shortly.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:30 PM | Permalink

September 14, 2005

Understanding How Google Grabs Feeds with "FeedFetcher"

If you're interested in learning more about how Google retrieves and displays RSS/ATOM feeds that end up on personalized homepages, the folks in Mountain View have just posted an FAQ about what they call Google "FeedFetcher."

Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users choose to add them to their Google homepage. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Google's search services (feeds only appear in our search results if they've been crawled by Googlebot).

Posted by Gary Price at 5:18 PM | Permalink

After Just a Few Hours With Google Blog Search: Comments and Wishes

After a few hours of testing Google Blog Search (GBS), here are a few comments, complaints, and things I would like to see in the future.

  • Google needs to do a better job explaining what Google Blog search indexes vs. what's available from Google News.
  • The Google Blog Search "related blogs" section section offers access to non-blog RSS feeds like weather info from NOAA. Is the NOAA home page a blog? Please explain. Plenty of valuable and current info, in addition to blog content, is available via RSS and Google Blog Search could do a lot to promote non-blog uses of the technology.

  • Explanation that GBS is NOT always a full text search. In other words, if it's just a "snippet" feed, you might be missing useful material. Actually, other blog/rss engines should do the same thing and explain (aka teach) users what they are and are not searching. If it's older material, Google could also provide a link to check Google's main web index where the complete blog MIGHT be part of a frequent crawl/recrawl.

  • I'm not a fan of filters but when you promote the fact that you offer one (it's mentioned in a guide to GBS that Google sent me) it should work. I searched (Wed. afternoon) for words that are blocked on Google Web Search but they're currently not blocked when searching the new blog database. I activated SafeSearch (strict filtering) from the preferences page and from the advanced search page and still no go.

  • Ability to combine other Google Blog Search syntax with the link: command. Btw, combining other syntax with link: is also not possible with Google Web Search.

  • Option to remove from results blogs that simply scrape headlines from other blogs especially when the blog originally posting the item is included.

  • Option to quickly add blogs discovered via Google Blog Search to your aggregator, personalized page, or Google Sidebar with just a click. Something similar for pre-emptive search queries delivered via RSS would also be a timesaver.

  • A standalone blog directory organized by topic(s) based on publisher suggestion and mining the text of the blog over a period of time.

  • Option to limit by location of publisher if a Geotag is used. BlogDigger Local is offering this type of thing.

  • Clustering of "related" blog posts linked underneath each result. A great way to find related posts.

  • Improved Relevancy: One example. I did a search for my name [Gary Price] and found several non-relevant results in the first 20. In the second result "Gary" is found in one part of the post and "Price" in another. Then, back to results mentioning yours truly before posts discussing the "price" of movies for sale. Note: Yes, of course, I could search "Gary Price" and get more precise results but most searchers don't use quotes to denote phrases.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:46 PM | Permalink

Roundup Of Google Blog Search Commentary

Below, a roundup of bloggers and others talking about the new Google Blog Search service that's been launched. For more background on the service, see our Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search and Thoughts On & Poking At Google Blog Search posts.

  • Google's new blog search makes a great first impression has Robert Scoble doing an ego search for himself and finding it sucks because his blog isn't tops. Except it is tops but shows "Velveetaland" as the domain. Why? Glitch, hijacking, I dunno. But the actual link does lead directly to his site. He loves the speed and the relevance when doing an advanced search for scoble PDC, sorted by date. The only "advanced" thing there really is that he set results to show 100 listings rather than 10. Otherwise, it's just a multiword query. FYI, use the preference options to set results to 100 results permanently. Bad news? That does it for ALL of Google and doesn't let you have a sort by date preference, as I've written. Google Blog Search really needs its own preferences page just for that service, allowing sort by date as a lockdown option. More playing with Google blog search has him Robert playing more and liking Google more better, and Testing link search out on Google blog search especially in getting backlinks.  
  • Google adds blog search from Dave Winer doesn't seem happy you can get results in either RSS or Atom. Yeah, pick a format and go with it. Of course, if they picked Atom, he wouldn't be happy. So no surprise they decided to offer them both. He's also concerned that if he does a post without a title, Google doesn't seem to "have it." I don't see that. Here are results for his site. Here's the first result:

    http://archive.scripting.com/2005/09/14#When:8:19:23AM 46 minutes ago NPR has a podcast about the Roberts hearings. I caught a bit of it yesterday and it was really interesting. Surprisingly so. Scripting News - http://www.scripting.com/

    They've got the post -- they just don't have a title because the post doesn't have a title. Solution? Give posts titles. But it may be he's concerned that many of his posts don't appear when compared to Google web search. My other article explains this is the memory problem -- they only have info from March 2005 onward in Google blog search.  

  • Google launches blog search – is this the death knell for Technorati, et. al? from Forrester's Charlene Li comes out generally positive about the service. But the idea of Google stripping out "non-blog feeds" like weather and stock quote updates. Not what they tell us. Haven't poked hard enough to test, but if it's a feed, there's a chance it's in there. Only sites they know are in their hand-picked source list for Google News are potentially removed from Google Blog Search, we've been told.  
  • Welcome to the Blogosphere, Google! from Technorati's David Sifry doesn't have him putting Technorati in a casket but instead saying the competition will make things better for everyone.  
  • Google Blog Search is live from Technorati's Niall Kennedy talks about blog search as a potential new testing ground for search marketers. Not really. It's based off feeds, and the ranking is going to be much different than the full text indexing of web pages that web search uses. But then again, if you haven't yet starting running a proper blog, time to start doing them. As I said at an SES conference recently, they're the "acceptable" mirror site. IE, have a regular site and a blog, and that's just fine to the search world, assuming they do different things. And you should, because as you can see, to play in blog search, you need a blog. An ordinary site doesn't get in to have fun.  
  • Google Blog Search reviewed at Blog Herald thinks the link counts suck compared to the competition. Chances are, this is because the Google blog "memory" stretches back only to March 2005, as I wrote. Similar criticism over size of coverage, and chances area again that history is the issue.  
  • Google launches Blog Search at Six Apart, spotted via John Battelle, focuses more on Six Apart's AtomStream service that's in development, that flows out all the content of LiveJournal and TypePad content to any tool that wants them. Pinging and crawling might be eliminated if everyone just flowed out full information this way. Yes, except that blog/feed search services are increasingly encountering the same spam problems that web search has had to grapple with. Expect that if anyone can flow content, some are going to making use of this nice cloaking mechanism to be misleading. THAT's why web search engines crawl. The idea of flowing information to them isn't something they never thought off until now. They've simply learned not to trust what people might give to them. As blog spam continues to grow -- IE, "fake" doorway page style blogs -- the blog search world is going to learn in short order that flowing info may not work as well as they think. I really do hope some better solution will come about so people can feed content into the major services, rather than just sending URLs. Certainly Google's Froogle has seemed successful on this front.  
  • Google Launches Blogsearch from InsideGoogle posts thoughts here and finds that overall, it's likely to pull people from other blog search services.  
  • Google Blog Search Launched is discussion at Threadwatch.  

  • Via Barry's Search Engine Roundtable site, see also discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld.  

  • Google Blog Search Launched is discussion on our Search Engine Watch Forums. NEW ITEMS SINCE ORIGINAL POST  

  • Google Launches a Blog Search from Tara at ResearchBuzz who likes somethings, hates others, but especially thinks the default should be by date. I'm with you, Tara -- sort of. Problem for Google is that when you search by data, relevancy drops like made. Searches for [google] still bring back tons of junk/spam. Tara also details some of the URL switches used to get the number of results back, for those who want to dig really deep. She says site: works; I still find it does NOT. WAIT, MYSTERY SOLVED! I REALIZE IT WORKS IN COMBINATION WITH ANOTHER QUERY. In other words, site:napsterization.org brings back nothing but mary hodder -site:napsterization.org will work. Google web search used to not allow site: as a standalone search but that was changed a few months to a year ago, if I recall correctly. Blog search has yet to realize this and depends instead on blogurl: as the command.  

  • Dear Google, Thank you for blog search has Jason Calacanis expecting blog search to show up on the Google home page. Yeah, maybe. More likely, I think you'll see it combined with news, especially since there's only so many buttons you can put up there. Note to Jason -- no search engine wants to look like this, and people don't see those tabs/links anyway as the article that link leads to explains. Jason also completely overlooks the fact that plenty of news search services already put great small and individual publishers into the results there alongside MSM -- mainstream media or "traditional media." In fact, I'd wager the vast majority of news search sources in any major news search service are NOT traditional media outlets. So ease off the idea that this is a precursor to the big leveling of web society. Web search was already a leveler and remains so. Realistically, news and blogs go together as well as news and opinion go together. The two sides of the same coin and all that. Need that illustrated more. The new Memeorandum site does the blend well, as I explained yesterday.  

  • Google Launches Blog Search from Mary Hodder who has done a great series on blog search recently finds an ego search for her name doesn't get all references (it's likely the memory problem mentioned above, Mary). She also doesn't like that a serach for her own blog name bringing up her own pages over and over is annoying. Yep, and if if were web search, Google's clustering (showing you only up to two pages from the same site per results page) would have solved this. No clustering for blog search. Easy workaround, however. napsterization -site:napsterization.org. There you go -- your self-referential problem disposed of. She also notes no change in relevance when doing a link lookup and sorting by date or relevance. Betcha I know why. Google may simply not want to tell you what link it thinks has the most link juice flowing to a site. Overall, she thinks they've got a lot to learn about blog search. Probably, but it also sounds like that perhaps tailoring some of her regular searches with a few search commands might also get more of what she wants. NEW ITEMS SINCE LAST UPDATE ABOVE  

  • One Service, Two Faces from Ken Yarmosh highlights how the Blogger version makes a search within and find all posts feature available for listings. You could do this with the Google version, just not as easily.  

  • Google Introduces Blog Search from Tristan Louis wants to see one of the major search engines offer their own ping server. From talking with Google, they seem more behind the idea of supporting the development of FeedMesh as a solution.  

  • Blog Search: Redirects and Indexing from the official Blogger blog, spotted via InsideGoogle, notes that the redirect page you see when clicking on a result in blog search will be going away, now that it is no longer needed to help protect the secrecy of the project.  

  • After Just a Few Hours With Google Blog Search: Comments and Wishes from our own Gary Price has him giving a laundry list of wish, as well as showing how non-blog content is in the blog search engine and how SafeSearch fails to keep you safe.
We may add more items as we see them and as time allows. In the meantime, need more? See the new Memeorandum Tech page, and the new Google blog search is the top item, with tons and tons of links to discussion from across the web.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit the Google Blog Search Launched thread in our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:27 AM | Permalink

Thoughts On & Poking At Google Blog Search

Chris covered the launch of Google's new blog search in today's SearchDay article, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search. In this post, I want to add some of my own thoughts. I'll also be working up a rundown on reaction from others, and Gary may be adding his own thoughts as a postscript here or as a separate post. Top line thoughts? It's not spam free. I wish it were "full text" blog search to better represent the blog world. It's got a short memory, not going back past March 2005. But the backlink info looks good, certainly better than you'll get on Google itself.

  • Chris mentioned this in his article, but I think it's worth stressing, technically, this is FEED SEARCH. You are only searching through any feed that Google has found. Some blogs don't have feeds. Some feeds don't come from blogs. Google understands these issues and figures down the line, it may have to revisit changes to make it truly a blog search, if that's what's intended.  
  • By default, sorting is by RELEVANCE, not DATE. If you are looking for the latest posts on a particular topic, use the "Sort by date" link in the upper right-hand corner. Unfortunately, you can't save this as a preference. However...  
  • As Chris noted, you can have results constantly sent to you via a feed alert. The feed links are at the bottom of each page. So if you wanted to know the latest blogs mentioning Google, you'd search for that word, sort by date, then subscribe.  
  • Want to know the latest backlinks to your blog? Use the link: command, such as link:blog.searchenginewatch.com, sort by date, then subscribe to a feed of that search. That shows all links to your domain, to any page anywhere on your blog and will send you the newest ones.  
  • Want to know the latest backlinks to a particular post? Use the full page address, such as link:blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050831-091033. That brings back matches linking just to that page.  
  • Don't want to learn these commands? Just type in a full URL, with or without the http:// prefix into the Blogger version of Google Blog Search. It will automatically do the right thing there and show backlinks.  
  • As Chris notes, Google says that for blog search backlinks, it's not suppressing any of the links it knows about. To spell that out, here are some figures to contemplate:  

    Notice, a search across the ENTIRE web on Google brings back fewer backlinks than across the much more limited feed database on Google. Why? The third line shows the answer. A search on the ENTIRE web on MSN Search web search brings back more results as well, despite MSN supposedly having a slightly (very slightly) smaller database of pages based on self-reported figures. Google simply doesn't report all the backlinks it knows about for web search, something it has said time and again when pressed on the issue, a fact well know to many experienced search marketers.  

  • It's not FULL TEXT blog search. Huh? If you post to a blog, you might not send out the entire text of your post in a feed. We don't, for instance. Our reason is that we don't want everyone assuming they can reprint our material. Jason Calacanis of Weblogs has written of similar issues despite copyright warnings in his full-text feed. But Google's only currently searching what's in the feed, meaning that it actually may be ignorant of a huge amount of blog content that's not pushed in a feed. That produces some skewing, as I found with PubSub back in June. Ideally, I'd like to see Google do what Technorati does and grab the actual full-text of the post, rather than depend just on the feed. For its part, Google says this is something it's pondering.  
  • The site: command is said to work, but I didn't find that the case. site:scripting.com came back with no matches, for example. But the new blogurl:scripting.com seems to do the trick. However, compare that to site:scripting.com on Google web search. Blog search gets about 414 matches, while web search of that blog brings back 344,000 matches. It's a huge difference and show the greater blog coverage Google web search actually gives. The advanced search page highlights the issue. You'll see that the earliest date you can search back to is March 1, 2005. In other words, the feed database has a much shorter history range than the web database, something that full text indexing would solve -- though you'd lose the ability to more accurate do things like author and date range searching if you're taking scraped data, rather than delimited data in a feed.  
  • Spam clearly hasn't been eliminated. A search for google blog search brings up a series of "Related Blogs" that are all spammy in nature to me. However, the main results below look fairly clean. But for a query on google, spam is back with a vengeance. The first result (on Google's Blogger service) tells me:

Resources To Acquire Stanley Power Tool Or Draper Power Tool On The Internet Get your stanley power tool on the world wide web. The first thing I thought of is how easy it is to get stanley power tool online. Google has listings for many stanley power tool sites. There are lots of stanley power tool that will help you.

In fact, the first four results when sorted by date are all similar in terms of spammy, nonsensical copy. Doorway page spam on Google -- it is 1999!

What we need is either better spam filtering or some type of super "sort by date and relevancy" feature. PubSub's got a feature that's sort of like this, but when I last looked, I still found spam and irrelevant content getting though.

  • Freshness or comprehensiveness seems an issue. For that query on google, I get the latest post as being 40 minutes ago, with the one after that an hour ago, then the next one two hours ago. That's it? Over the past two hours, there's only been three blog posts about Google? While I don't want all those poor selections where just anything mentioning Google may come up, I also want to see the latest. What we need is either better spam filtering or some type of super "sort by date and relevancy" feature. PubSub's got a feature that's sort of like this, but when I last looked, I still found spam and irrelevant content getting though.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Google Blog Search Launched.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:19 AM | Permalink

Google (Finally) Offers Blog Search

Nearly two and a half years after buying Pyra Labs (the company that developed Blogger), Google has launched its blog search service (beta, natch). Although all of the major search engines have been dabbling with blog and feed search to a degree, Google is the first out the gate with an an industrial strength blog and feed search utility. It's very Google-like, with familiar search result pages and advanced search capabilities.

For more on the new service, including tips on making sure that your own feeds are picked up by the new blog search engine, read on in today's SearchDay article, Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search.

Want to discuss or comment? Visit our forum thread, Google Blog Search Launched.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:00 AM | Permalink

July 26, 2005

RSS Search & Add Option Now Available For Google Personalized Home Page

In the past few days, Google has unveiled a new "look-and-feel" along with a couple of new features to their personalized homepage including the ability to add RSS feeds to the page.

To make a feed visible on your Google Personalized home page, enter the url into the box located under the "create a section" header. If you don't know a feed's url or want Google Personalized to suggest feeds of possible interest, simply enter a feed's title or subject into the box.

Once a feed appears is added to your Google Personalized home page, only titles/headlines are visible. You'll need to click again to view the full text. It's also possible to change the number of headlines/titles visible (default is three) by clicking the edit button. Up to nine headlines/titles can be viewed on the page.

The Google Personalized Home Page went live in May. Here's Danny's overview article.

Another new Google Personalized feature offers an option to list important bookmarks on your page.

The option to add RSS feeds to Yahoo's My Yahoo service has been available since Fall 2004.

Postscript: I noted above that you could search for RSS content using the new feature, but it's worth stressing this significant change. The ability to search effectively gives Google a rudimentary feed discovery service, as Nathan points out, similar that offered by Yahoo and MSN Search, not to mention Ask Jeeves-owned Bloglines.

Postscript 2 (from Danny): After scratching my head wondering why the darn thing wasn't working for me, I came across Brad Hill's post that the CustomizeGoogle extension sadly is the problem. Sure enough, when I got rid of that, the page worked for me.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:51 AM | Permalink

May 2, 2005

Gmail Web Clips: More On Google's Feed Aggregator, Plus Feeds From Google News

Checking my Gmail account today, I discovered that I'm apparently now one of the few with access to the new Gmail "web clips" feed reading feature I mentioned earlier. Here's how it works and some more details.

You'll see feed headlines shown at the top of the Gmail page, above all the messages in your Inbox, when viewing an email or anything within Gmail. Here's a screenshot:

In that example, "Reuters: Oddly Enough" is the title of the feed currently being viewed. Next to it is a headline from that feed, the hyperlink taking you to the article or post. Next to that is the time the article was posted.

See the words "Web Clip" and the little < > arrows next to it? Those let you move forward or backwards through headlines in the feeds you've subscribed to.

That's it -- a rudimentary feed reader, to say the least. Unless I'm missing something, that's all you can do to view your feeds. You can't click on anything to see all headlines from a particular feed. You can't see a single page with headlines from all sources -- much less headlines and descriptions. All you can do is keep clicking the little arrows.

Odd? Yeah, but I'm sure we'll see it develop. So far, it really seems designed as a serendipitous thing. As you read different email messages, the headlines keep changing -- so it's an easy way to read mail and also perhaps spot a new news item. Or ads! That's because AdSense ads sometimes appear in that area, as well.

Google's Default & Suggested Feeds

By default, you're already subscribed to three feeds:

Why these three? All Google will say is that they were hand-picked with a focus on a good user experience and high quality content.

Want more? Use the Settings option in Gmail, then the Web Clips option. Look below your subscribed feeds, and there's an "Add more clips" link. In turn, that lets you pick from choices in News, Business, Lifestyle, Fun, Tech and Sports categories.

How did the 10 or so feeds featured in each category -- such as ABC News, NPR, Slashdot and Yahoo News: Most Emailed -- get such favored status? Again, Google said only that the choices were hand picked with a focus on user experience.

Google News Gains Feeds

By the way, Google News has some of its own feeds in there:

  • Google News - World
  • Google News - Business
  • Google News - Entertainment
  • Google News - Health
  • Google News - Sports

Yes, that's right. You can actually get Google News content through a feed without having to resort to workarounds. But bad news, non-Gmail folks. These feeds only work for those within Gmail. I can't find a published address for them. That's kept hidden within Gmail.

You can get Google News alerts for any keyword you wish to track, of course -- but that's sent via email. In contrast, Yahoo News offers actual news feeds to the public right now, as described more here: Yahoo Gains Financial Feeds; A Revisit To Yahoo News Feeds

Also noteworthy is that the feed reader functionality changes slightly when viewing a Google News feed. A new "related articles" link appears next to the posting time and the "Web Clip" text next to the arrows changes to Google News, as shown below:

Add Any Feed & When's This Coming To Everyone?

What if you want something beyond the feeds Google recommends? No problem. You can easily add any feed you like using the Custom Clips option. Just enter the URL of the feed, and away you go.

So I'm lucky in that my Gmail account is enabled -- how about everyone else? Google says it's just a small randomly selected test right now and there's no clear timing on when it will be rolled out to more people. In the meantime, the clipless such as Steve Rubel will have to read about web clips via the Google help pages that he spotted:

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:49 PM | Permalink

December 2, 2004

MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search?

MSN is now offering blogging space through its new MSN Spaces service, making it the third major portal to jump into this area. The first? Google, of course.

Google a portal? Sure, a stealth portal. It's got all the traditional portal features of email, search and free home pages -- or at least the successor to personal home pages, blogs. You just don't see them all displayed in a traditional portal format.

My Google Buys Blogging Company - But Why? article from Feb. 2003 looks at the issue of blogs as a portal feature and Google heading down that path. One of the predictions in it, which was obvious to many, was that once Google knocked over the blog domino, other portals would follow.

AOL launched its AOL Journals service in September 2003. Now with MSN in the space, that leaves just Yahoo among the majors.

Yahoo still has the GeoCities personal home pages service (valued at $3.6 billion when acquired in 1999 -- in contrast, Google likely paid only a few million for Blogger). But I'm sure we'll eventually see Yahoo gain a blogging system as well.

All this is great for those seeking to build blogs, though it has nothing to do with search. What none of the majors yet offer is an actual blog search service.

Yahoo is the closest now, making it at least possible to search to find blog feeds but not through actual blog entries. MSN has promised an actual blog search engine to come out later this year. Google's also said last year that a blog search would come, though it gave no timeline about when. Aside from the majors, we list a number of other blog search engines here.

For more details of the new MSN Spaces service, see this ClickZ article: MSN Enters Blogging Fray with "Spaces". And as an aside, Microsoft blogvangelist Robert Scoble says he's sticking with the Radio UserLand service and provides a wrap-up of reaction to the new Microsoft entry.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBack