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How to... |
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 Using Google Blog Search
According to
The Blog Herald, there are now in excess of 70
million blogs being regularaly updated. Who is
doing all this writing? Most of the blog
service providers are in the United States, but the
blogging population is from all over the world:
approximately 15 million in South Korea, 2.5 million
in the UK, 1.4 million in Poland, 5 million in
China, 400,000 in Australia, and so on. The
leading blog services are
Xanga,
MSN Spaces,
Blogger.com,
Cyworld,
SixApart (TypePad and LiveJournal), and several
others.
Now, this does not mean that there are over 70
million bloggers. I have three blogs I use for
different purposes. What it does mean is that
there are a lot of text being generated in the
blogosphere on a lot of topics. The "blogosphere"
is different and separate from the web, though they
both work with the same protocols in the same space
on the Internet. The blogosphere is much more
interconnected because most blogs allow reader
comments and trackbacks (a list of blogs that link
to other blogs). So how do you find something
amidst this babble? Enter Google Blog Search.
You will find Google Blog Search at
http://blogsearch.google.com. Its
interface is the same, pleasant, minimalist
interface used by all the Google search products.
In fact, recently, it has been better integrated
into the overall Google search design (see "The
New Google: Universal Search" from episode 60).
Blogs are subscribable, which means you can
receive them automatically in any RSS (really simple
syndication) aggregator (or "news reader," as they
are often called). Many people use their IE7
or Firefox browsers as their news readers.
Others use web-based services such as
Newsgator or
Google Reader. Others install specialized
stand-alone software which does the same thing.
(For more on RSS,
click here). Whatever tool you use, they
work the same. Blog "feeds" are syndicated by
means of a simple XML file called the blog's "RSS
feed," or "Atom feed." (RSS and Atom are,
confusingly, two different syndication format
standards -- it truly doesn't matter which is used
and most blogs use both). When you "subscribe
to a blog" (there is no money involved, in spite of
the word "subscribe") you start receiving in your
news reader a headline and brief summary of the
latest blog posting as it is posted. To read
the entire post, simply click on it in your news
aggregator.
Google does the same thing. Instead of
sending their spiders out to scour the web for
content, as with their web search, they simply
subscribe to all blogs. The text comes to
them. They then index it and allow users to
search it using the same sorts of sophisticated
algorithms their web search tools use. It is
important to understand that Google Blog Search
searches all blogs, not just those created through
blogger.com, Google's own blog service provider.
Because of the quicker retrieval of text, blog
postings get indexed and show up in search results
much more quickly than web page postings, usually
within less than an hour.
Let's say we want to investigate further the news
article we published above about Linnaeus, polar
bears and speciation. Entering "Linnaeus
species polar bear" in the Blog Search search box
will return 62 hits sorted by relevance. The
fourth in order is a commentary on the Nature
article we referenced in the news story. There
is a link on the search results page to Sort by date
(in the upper right), and to filter the display by
time published (Last hour, Last 12 hours, Last day,
Past week, Past month, Anytime (the default), and a
date range selection) in the upper left of the
screen. At the bottom of the search results
screen there are links to 1) create an email alert
for Linnaeus species polar bear (or whatever search
terms you entered--this means you will receive an
email informing you each time (they will be grouped
if multiple postings occur on the same day) there is
a new blog posting on these topics; 2) add a blog
search gadget for your search term on your Google
home page (it updates automatically each day showing
the latest blog postings on your topic); and/or 3)
subscribe to a blog search feed for your search
term. That's right. Google blog search
will create an automated blog feed and place all the
new blog postings on your topic in it and make it
subscribable by you in your news feed reader.
That is what you would call leveraging the
technology.
If a basic blog search does not find what you are
looking for, there is an Advanced Blog Search, which
should look familiar to users of other Google search
products. Advanced
The usual filters are available. Google
also provides a Preferences panel where you can
select preferred interface language, search
language, language filter, safe search filter,
number of results per page, and results window
behavior (open in new window is the default).
Pick a topic and try it out. The results
are often amazing.
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