Google has introduced its long awaited blog search service, says Search Engine Watch, becoming the first major search engine to offer full-blown blog and feed search capabilities. It’s expected to put pressure on blog search specialists like Technorati.
It’s been nearly two and a half years since Google purchased Pyra Labs, the company that built the hugely popular Blogger publishing service, and Google has been promising blog search ever since then.
While Google web search has allowed you to limit results to popular blog file types such as RSS and XML in web search results for some time, and its news search includes some blogs as sources, Google hasn’t had a specialized tool to surface purely blog postings. In fact, while all of the major search engines have been dabbling with blog and feed search, none has done much with blog search until now.
Google’s new service (in beta, naturally) is available both at google.com/blogsearch and search.blogger.com. Google blog search scans content posted to blogs and feeds in virtually real-time, according to Jason Goldman, Google product manager for blog search.
“We look for sites that update pinging services, and then we crawl in real-time so that we can serve up search results that are as fresh as we can,” said Goldman.
Google defines blogs as sites that use RSS and other structured feeds and update content on a regular basis.
“It’s hard to say what Google’s major focus should be going forward, said Vint Cerf, newly installed chief Internet evangelist at Google.
He told CNET News.com earlier this summer, he sees transmission of “spacely” information–that is, the capability to locate, say, the nearest hospital or ATM from mobile devices–as a critically important venture.
“I think what’s very clear, based on the excitement associated with Google Earth, is the exploitation of geographically indexed information is clearly ripe for more development,” he said. He also plans to ask Google engineers whether they’ve investigated the possibility of a voice-enabled search, which he says could be useful “in places in the world where people aren’t literate but can speak.”
Hey, Vint, how about one of those wireless cloud thingies.
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