Google Launches Category Killer Blog Search Beta

Google has launched a long-awaited beta of Google Blog Search, sure to be nicknamed Bloogle, and called an "industrial strength blog search" by Search Engine Watch. Content is indexed from June 2005, although the FAQs say that older posts will soon be added.

Google defines blogs as sites that use RSS and other structured feeds and update content on a regular basis. If your blog doesn't have RSS, you won't be included.

As always, your site description is crucial to search results. Mine includes the words "Internet strategy" and my blog comes up Number One in a search on that phrase.

Blog Search indexes blogs by their site feeds, which will be checked frequently for new content by Google robots. (They check my blog about every 15 minutes according to my logs.) Therefore, Bloogle results will update with new content much faster than standard web searches. It's also a highly accurate search, unlike other blog search engines I've used.

Look out Technorati and every other blog search: You can also discover who's linking to a post or blog using the link: command.

Google blog search results, sorted by relevance or date, point primarily to individual blog postings, with a title and snippet from each—strongly resembling Google's web search results.

You can also save a blog search as an alert that gets updated any time new content is posted matching you query. Google blog search allows you to issue a query and then subscribe to that query via your RSS feed reader, with either 10 or 100 results being displayed. I couldn't figure out how to do that.

Google is not offering any means of submitting a blog or feed to the new service now, but says they will soon.

More info in the Google Blog Search FAQ

Google+Blog+Search, Google, Internet+strategy

BL,

Google blog search allows you to issue a query and then subscribe to that query via your RSS feed reader, with either 10 or 100 results being displayed. I couldn't figure out how to do that.

If you right-click on the 10 (or more usefully 100) link, select Copy Link, go to your RSS reader, click New Subscription and paste in the link (it should be something like http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&num=100&c2coff=1&as_eq=&bl_url=&lr=lang_en&q=bl+ochman&btnG=Search+Blogs) - this should do it for you.

Cheers,

Tom