Google’s just updated their blog search to include trend data. On the right of the page you’re now able to see what the hot queries are on blog search and some of the latest posts.
We notice that far from every blog qualifies to appear in the ‘latest posts’ section. This adds weight to the evidence that Google tiers blogs by quality.
Blog Search
Over at Mashable Adam Ostrow asks whether we still need a separate blog search engine. It’s an interesting point.
On one hand Google is now doing a good job of integrating blog results into the main web index as part of Universal Search and generally a blog post qualifies for web search anyway (unlike those documents found almost exclusively in Google Scholar or Google Book Search).
On the other hand everyone seems to be saying that Google is weak on real time search. Aren’t these enhancements to Google blog search supposed to be helping to address those perceived short comings?
Perhaps the advantage Twitter has in this area isn’t just that it provides real time search but it provides it for a huge community. People in the Twitter community are interested in what’s happening – in real time – around them because they can take part in the conversation. The same can’t be said for Google’s blog search which is a near real time search of strangers.
Here at Brinkwire we’ve thought of a few uses of the new RSS feeds from Google’s blog search. In particular we think that bloggers, affiliates and news watchers will be interested to see what the headlining topics of conversation are – and wouldn’t it be good to be able to monitor those topics without flicking from one site or feed to another.
The Brinkwire toolbar is designed with those people in mind. The toolbar – found at http://brinkwire.toolbar.fm – presents four main sets of updates;
- The latest news from Brinkwire
- The latest topic trends from Wikipedia (via WikiRank)
- The latest hot trends from Google search (US results only)
- The latest front page stories from Google blog search
In addition the toolbar uses a Google powered search box and contains a bunch of tools to provide easy access to URL shorteners, Twitter, translations and other useful aids.
Update: Google’s kept up with the innovations and inventions. Since this post was written the blog search data has been removed from the toolbar and replaced with popular shared posts from Google Reader. Why? We want to focus more on breaking news than broken news. Life is fluid!
July 3, 2009
Widgets