Google Blog Search - Not Impressed

Updated on November 17, 2023
By Pete Freitag

Google has no doubt not surprised anyone with their new Blog Search (was blogsearch.google.com) ^BETA.

What is surprising is the search result quality. I was hoping the Google would use their immense trust of brain power to come up with a blog search that produces good accurate and relevant results. But they didn't.

The main problem google has yet to tackle is blog spam. Try searching for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - a best selling book with lots of blog entries. In the top 10 most relevant results 8 out of 10 of the results were spam! The blog entry consists of nothing more than the phrase Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince repeated about 10 times. (I just realized that this post is going to throw off the results of that search.)

These results tell me two things. First, it must be really easy to spam this search engine (AltaVista Circa 1995). And second they aren't using any where near the technology they use to calculate relevancy in the regular google SERP's. Don't you think the blog search relevance results ought to use backlinks?

Blog spam is a big problem for google - it is estimated by Tim Yang that 40-60% of google's own blogspot blogs are spam.

This all leaves me a bit confused, and unimpressed. If anyone knows web search, its google - but perhaps no one yet understands blog search. I wouldn't have thought it would be all that different from web search.

Another thing I found annoying was the redirect pages. The first thing I did when I found out about blog search was check my logs to see if I was getting any traffic from blog search. Google has made it impossible to track what keywords were used.

I was talking to Jason Dowdell about it, and I think they were put there when Google was testing internally, they just forgot to take them out. It looks like that may be the case, and will be gone in a day or two.

In my view Google blog search has only one thing going for them right now - speed

What do you think?

google blog search spam

Google Blog Search - Not Impressed was first published on September 14, 2005.

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Comments

I think, since it is in beta.. well hopefully alot will improve.

I know, everything Google does is in Beta.. But at least this actually feels like it is in Beta.

I did a search for a wordpress plugin I created, I maintain, and that is detailed in my blog. My blog never even showed up in the search results. Most of the results were in portugese.

While I didn't necessarilly expect it to be the first result I did expect it to appear since all of those other sites do link to my page.

by Bill on 09/14/2005 at 5:45:49 PM UTC

Why would there be a need for blog searching?? A good blog is already indexed by Google.. so why build a different search tool... I am also not impressed but more by the fact that it doesn't at anything to regular searching that's already working.

by Tjarko on 09/15/2005 at 7:05:14 AM UTC

Pete, have you checked out IceRocket.com yet? It's backed by Mark Cuban and is pretty slick. Here's his own write up about BlogSearch vs. IceRocket. I've been using IceRocket, and I like the relevance of its results much better:

http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000247058976/

by Dave Carabetta on 09/15/2005 at 5:05:44 PM UTC

"since it is in beta", what of theirs isn't beta? I think they term beta on everything is just a trendy cop out. It gives them the liberty to say, "oh, well it is just beta" where there is a problem.

by Zach Wilson on 09/16/2005 at 5:51:55 PM UTC

I am puzzled at not being able to find some of my 90 or so blogs. If the links are there, they should be googleable. I use blogger. I sometimes get the impression a lot of blogs end up in some sort of holding tank and are not really posted on the world wide web they way we think they are supposed to. Could be very wrong but would like some feedback on this issue.

by sean oreilly on 11/16/2006 at 9:28:55 PM UTC