What happened to Google Blog Search?
What happened to Google Blog Search? It was a great way to see the freshest links pointing to recent blog posts.
Then suddenly last week, it became worthless. 90% of what it now points to are Big Picture posts, and any TBP links back to itself. I used to be able to see any site that linked to the blog. Now, the vast majority of blog search results are The Big Picture. (kinda pointless).
What ever algorithmic change they made has successfully eliminated nearly all the utility it had. Very unGoogle-like.
Technorati is a clumsy alternative -- it requires an additional click-through for every site -- but at least it works.
Any Googler's out there have a clue as to what may have changed with the code? You guy should restore this to its prior glory . . .
Monday, September 10, 2007 | 02:30 PM | Permalink
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I spent the last 7 years working as a search engine optimization consultant so I'll take a crack at this. However, I can't claim to have any expertise with their blog search tool. I can tell you that a few years ago the "link:" functionality on Google was intentionally disabled/scrambled by Google. Inbound links are very valuable for ranking well in search results and the assumption was that Google got tired of people using this info to game their system. So they made the tool intentionally produce false/incomplete results. This also happened with their Page Rank reporting. Perhaps they have now done that with this blog search too.
Posted by: 12th percentile | Sep 10, 2007 3:15:06 PM
Yes, I noticed recently that the search bar that's embedded in my Blogger blog now only retrieves a partial list of search results.
Something has changed recently with their blog search, especially as it is presented in the new Blogger format, but I do still like to use Google's blog search pages because I tend to get the best results.
I've also found that the search results sometimes vary between the two Google blog search interfaces (Google interface vs. Blogger interface).
http://www.google.com/help/about_blogsearch.html#findit
I really don't like using Technorati much since their last overhaul, but you can still get very decent blog post search results by using their simplified blog search.
Yahoo! Site Explore lists inlinks to your site, but it can be very difficult to wade through all the links they find/list. There are tons of links from spam-sites and they seem to list results from every page of one blog that might have one link to your site on the front page somewhere. Worth a shot though, for anyone who wants to find links to their site.
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Posted by: David | Sep 10, 2007 3:32:59 PM
I realize that this would represent YOU bending to the tool, but one immediate solution might be to append
-site:bigpicture.typepad.com
on the end of your Google search to eliminate any matches where the site contains bigpicture.typepad.com. I do hope this helps, and thank you for the valuable commentary.
Posted by: Ed | Sep 10, 2007 5:16:58 PM
Do you allow Google to slant (read "personalize") your search results based on what they deem is relevant for you? Try turning off search history in your google profile preferences and see if that makes a difference...
Posted by: tekel | Sep 10, 2007 7:13:07 PM
The Ministry of Truth would be my guess - way to much real history being written in the blogosphere.
Posted by: Winston Munn | Sep 10, 2007 7:23:56 PM
The Chinese told Google to do it and of course Google said how much child and prison and slave labor do we have to ignore this time.
American Capitalism is so wonderful.
Posted by: Lori Watts | Sep 11, 2007 2:15:58 AM
Google's blogsearch returns little but spam for me. At least Technorati allows you to sort results by their "authority" - http://search.technorati.com which helps to weed out most of the spam. I just can't use Google's blog search anymore.
Posted by: Jim Duncan | Sep 11, 2007 10:14:18 AM
Google has been worse and worse lately. Their Google Updater runs silently in the background (two programs, one you can quit, one you can't, both startup programs). They also don't pay attention to user feedback - I've been posting over and over about it on the Google Finance Blog, which is buggy as hell.
Posted by: undergroundman | Sep 11, 2007 3:28:43 PM
