Google To Create "Blog" Search; Potentially Remove From Main

Skyshadow writes "Google, search engine of choice for pretty much everyone, has announced that it will begin a seperate index for blogs and remove them from the normal index, handling them instead in much the same way as their usenet archives. This will hopefully put an end to the recent difficulties locating primary source material among the mountains of blogs which are clogging the ratings system." There's been comments from elsewhere that says they won't be removing them - but that remains to be seen.

Re:journals

[Anonymous Coward]

You see that block of ads at the top of the page, that looks like some classifieds crammed into a banner?

That's what "Mediapartners-Google*" is. Google driven ads for slashdot.

Re:journals

[Cyberdyne]

Oh, wait.... It says "User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*" can scan everything. This surprises me however. Still, that's not "GoogleBot", which I see from time to time in my apache logs.

Anybody got an idea what "Mediapartners-Google*" exactly is?

Mediapartners-Google would appear to be Google's ad engine - it tries to determine "relevant" ads for the page by spidering it beforehand. Presumably, you would only see hits from that bot if you serve Google text-ads; GoogleBot is the crawler which drives the actual search engine.

(Aside: Those text ads were quite tricky to filter out - not being images, there's no 'block images' option! Putting "127.0.0.1 pagead.googlesyndication.com" in /etc/hosts did the trick, though...)

The Register is... a bit off

[friedegg]

"GoogleGuy" (a real Google employee) commented on this [webmasterworld.com] on WebmasterWorld saying:

I think Andrew Orlowski is taking a comment and taking it in the direction that he wants to go. I would take that article with a grain of salt.

GoogleGuy, going for understatement. :)

Re:Ev from Blogger

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, go to this entry [evhead.com] at evhead, and view the source, you'll see:

<span title="you know, in order to spread more 'Google censors Evhead' suspicions"></snip></span>
<!-- Andrew Orlowski strikes with another brilliant theory [theregister.co.uk] designed to get attention from bloggers (even though the number of their readers is of course "statistically insignificant"). Well shit, I'm biting.

Based on Eric Schmidt's mentioning of a blog search [yahoo.com], Orlowski suggests that Google will remove blogs from the main index.

This shouldn't surprise many people, but as far as I know, Orlowski is full of crap. Again. If Google didn't find that blogs improved the results (and I don't know, I would assume they test these things, like, constantly), do you suppose they'd increase the frequency at which they crawl them, or decrease it? Yes, that's what I think.

Too bad my headline isn't any truer than the Register's.-->

Re:Blogs removed from google = FUD

[lysurgon]

(replying to own post)

So here's what should be the final word:

If Google didn't find that blogs improved the results (and I don't know, I would assume they test these things, like, constantly), do you suppose they'd increase the frequency at which they crawl them, or decrease it? Yes, that's what I think.

From evhead [evhead.com]

Re:Blogs removed from google = FUD

[eadz]

Even more authorative
GoogleGuy saying its FUD : [webmasterworld.com]
"I think Andrew Orlowski is taking a comment and taking it in the direction that he wants to go. I would take that article with a grain of salt.
GoogleGuy, going for understatement. :) "

The real story: Orlowski (successfully) trolls /.

[marmoset]

Oy. If Slashdot had managed to perform even a minimum amount of editorial diligence (which, pot, here's kettle, is what the Register rails on bloggers for not doing), they'd have found pretty quickly that this article is yet another installment in Andrew Orlowski's (an up-and-coming Dvorak-wannabe) ongoing jihad against weblogs. Don't believe the hype.

Re:Google's games go on...

[kalidasa]

Did you report it to the bug database - where it ISN'T OFFTOPIC?

Re:/. is a blog, no?

[Eponymous Coward]

Take a look at RobotWisdom.com. This is one of the original weblogs and it seems very similar to Slashdot. Okay, there are no user comments (which arguably is where the value in Slashdot is), but the similarities are apparent.

I would say that measuring the legitimacy of a site and it's content by the number of banner ads and subscriptions is foolish and far too narrow.

Not Quite

[emmastory]

Google hasn't announced any such thing, at least as far as removing weblog content from the main search is concerned. If you read the article, you'll note that it's Orlowski speculating about a Slashdot comment, of all things - specifically, a comment from the William Gibson [slashdot.org] blog thread. evhead posted [evhead.com] about this Register article on Friday.

Re:'Bout time

[samael]

Radio Userland have been around for at least 5 years, if not longer.

Re:The real story: Orlowski (successfully) trolls

[beebware]

It's not just weblogs he's against: just search on "El Reg" for "google" and see what strange articles you come up with "google news is edited by humans yet google claims it is by computer program - but who programs the computers?" style article. The author? His surname starts with O...

Re:journals

[Cyberdyne]

Could you provide more details on this please? I didn't find any reference to the host you mentioned in the google results page source (which had text ads)...

Different system. Google's search results have the text inserted inline, by the search engine itself; I was talking about the "banner ads" carried by other sites (including Slashdot). Obviously, Google can't insert those ads inline as they do for their own site - instead, the site includes a snippet of javascript, which retrieves the appropriate banner ad from that host. Browse around Slashdot until you hit one of these ads, then look at that page's source.