The long awaited Google blog search is has gone live earlier today making it the first major search engine to offer a dedicated blog search platform. This service is set to be a major player among the blog search industry which currently includes Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket and several more.

According to the FAQ’s:

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

With all the hype around this service I must say that I am a bit disappointed with the current service. Since the service relies solely on information provided through RSS feeds (rather than reading entire posts), it is very limited because:

1. Since the amount of content included in feeds is relatively small the search index will only include that content.
2. Since most feeds include only 10-15 back posts, posts made before June 2005 are not likely to be indexed.
3. It will not be able to provide linking information between posts and blogs.

All in all I would expect Google to cross reference indexes and use information already stored in it’s search index (such as entire page content) to better it’s blog search. The product is currently very basic, and if I was one of the rivals I would not be too worried. On the other hand it is still a ‘Beta’ products and may improve with time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.