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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Google Blog Search

So Google has finally launched a Blog focused search page at blogsearch.google.com. It's strange that it's taken them so long to pull this one out after the acquisition of Blogger many moons ago. Apparently Technocrati offers this kind of functionality already, setting the pair up as opposing forces (hopefully meaning a healthy level of feature creep). It apparently works off RSS feeds, which will ensure a more frequent updating of the index than you get on standard Google. The downside is that, according to Scripting News, it doesn't play too well with posts that don't have a title (something I always avoided in the past due to the precious minutes often required to think up titles). There's more commentary at that link.

I ran some tests, because I am greatly bored. Tests may in fact need to be downgraded to "I had a fiddle" actually. I used Jack Cross 1 as my subject because I was interested to see whether the consensus was similar to my own opinions (see the post below). Initially I noticed that it's far more essential to make good use of grouping expected grouped search terms, like "Jack Cross", than it is in regular web search Google (in my experience at least). Once I did that I no longer got a list of results that brought me huge posts about someone named Jack, which later turned into a discussion of something that made someone cross. I did notice that my own post had not yet been indexed (established by a "Fortnightly Comics Parcel" search only bringing up parcel 1, not parcel 2*). It's strange that the "updating much more frequently due to RSS magic!" blogsearch was not picking up a post from a week ago.

Incidentally, the opinion on Jack Cross seemed to fall around the same area as my own, with obvious swings further towards each extreme. This one ran along similar lines to mine, that it was not an enthralling first issue and didn't tell us enough to engage with the book in the long term, but did tell a reasonable beginning to the story. Actually clicking on Read More on that post gives you a more negative view of the comic than my own, but it's in the same ball park (and it's not a stock "Ellis is crap, this is crap" review at all). On the other hand, this post is still in the same area but focuses much more on a positive view of what's there in the book. It's quite rightly not generating the same level of enthusiasm that Fell and Desolation Jones have.

So yes, off the point there somewhat. The Google blogsearch seems like a promising start to a tool and it's something I think I'll make use of myself for exercises like the above, whether here or just for interest.

* I have since redone the search and now it's showing everything, including this post. So it obviously does refresh very very quickly indeed. Bastards!

Posted by Alex Hopkinson @ 1:26 PM


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All original content is copyright Alex Hopkinson 2005. Other content is copyright the respective owners. To contact the author email: alex [at] bad-words.com
 

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