Google just announced a number of changes to its blog search engine, Google Blog Search, but none of them will knock your socks off. RSS feeds for search queries were added, something that no self-respecting search engine of dynamic content would be without. Hot search queries and recent posts from popular blogs round out the slight redesign of the Blog Search home page.
While many different Google projects push the envelope with features and interface innovation – users are excited just to see Blog Search make catch-up moves, since it’s a sign that the product is still breathing at all. No news about much needed spam control, no response to Twitter stealing many blogs’ thunder, no personalization, no visualization, no semantics, no mobile play – nothing. It’s really disappointing. Google Blog Search remains the best option if you’re looking for fast results, but other options are better if you have any needs other than speed.
Six months ago we published an article titled The State of Blog Search, 2009. Here’s what we wrote then about Google Blog Search:
Google Blog Search is the fastest in the industry but has gone almost untouched since the day it launched, except for a recent dabble with meme-tracking on the front page. Google Blog Search spam control is not good and recently the search engine started bringing back search results from places like blog sidebars. [Update: that appears to have been fixed now.] It thinks that content is new, too, every time a new blog post (the content we really care about) is published. It’s painful to look at Google Blog Search results pages, but if you’ve got a need for speed or want to make use of the relative heft of the Google search input box for things like complex queries – then it’s a good option.
Day in and day out, I use Ask.com’s blog search instead. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but there’s a whole lot less spam.
Is blogging such old news that only Twitter search is interesting to innovators anymore? When it comes to more thought-out, long-form, researched, discussed news and opinion, blogs still matter. We wish Google felt the same way. The web is a really exciting place these days – why isn’t Google Blog Search?
