Google To Create "Blog" Search; Potentially Remove From Main 311
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.
journals (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there any chance of having an RSS feature for journals, for everyone or even just subscribers?
'Bout time (Score:4, Interesting)
OTOH, what constitutes a 'blog'? Is Slashdot a blog? Is this a blog [witchvox.com]? The lines are constantly being blurred, and I'm not sure it'll be easy for google to make that distinction.
Re:journals (Score:5, Interesting)
Good to weed out.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If it ain't broke...don't fix it
-Rob
Re:journals (Score:3, Interesting)
Anybody got an idea what "Mediapartners-Google*" exactly is?
ID? (Score:2, Interesting)
I also like the analogy made by the article to the voting system where a page votes for a topic: an expert site on turtles voting for turtles once a day every year vs. a blog mentioning turtles once in that same period leads to the expert site winning.
An end to 'Googlewashing'? (Score:5, Interesting)
/. is a blog, no? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I originally found Slashdot on RobotWisdom-- yet another weblog. But that was a couple of years ago...
blogs (Score:5, Interesting)
This move by google tells me newspapers in norway aren't the only ones seeing how influental blogs will/could become.This is a truly great step forward if Google could come up with a way of rating the different blogs. That way you could easily find serious tech-blogs.
Wonder what rating
is ./ a blog? ebay? (Score:5, Interesting)
And what about ebay? Quite often I am searching for info on an old piece of electronics I've picked up someplace, and I do a goole search, hoping to find information about the item. Well, all I get in return are ebay links to a similar item that was sold on ebay a few months ago. And even then, I click on the link, hoping to see what the item sold for (and thus get an appraisal), but the auction has been removed from the database due to it being several months old. Why index ebay pages? It's really frustrating.
Loomis
Re:blogs.google.com? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a reasonable solution, I think. Is it worth tainting the vast majority of the search results with useless blog entries just so that the (very) few blogs with good information will still show up?
This solves their problem with bloggers manipulating search results, yet still keeps the information available to those who want it. Granted, you have to know to look for it, but it seems to me like a fair trade-off.
I'd rather they do this for mailing list archives (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, it is really a pain to search for help on something, and instead of getting a useful, authoritative document, I'll get a half-dozen archived unanswered mailing list posts from people with the same problem. I would much rather Google address this dilution from mailing lists.
What is a Blog anyway? (Score:1, Interesting)
Selectivity is a good thing if done right (Score:5, Interesting)
The general consensus appears to view this tabbed filtering as a good thing. There are some valid concerns about missing out on good information as a result. Naturally one can go to the "Blog tab" to conduct a search but most people will likely tend not to do this.
It seems to me that this may be an opportunity for google to improve upon their user interface a bit. Since most folks use the simple imterface provided on the main page it seems to me that adding a few check boxes just below the text box would be a good idea. That would allow for the quick addition of groups and/or blogs to your search query.
How will they filter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:'Bout time (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I noticed that Radio Userland appeared very high on Google. In fact, when you search for "radio"* they get a #5 at Google. As far as i know they only existed for a year. And their popularity, as it appears on google, looks very inflated because of extremly many links in blogs.
Checked out Daypop.com, which ranks articles/links based on the number of links in blogs. This is what I got:
Searching All Weblogs for link:radio.userland.com... Found 3260 pages matching query.
Thats insane. When so many blogs links to the same page their ranking on google gets very high based only on blog-popularity.
*Searching for only radio is obvious a bad idea as google returns some 40 m. hits.
Re:Good to weed out.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm looking forward to this, since most of the stuff Google hits in blogs is completely and utterly irrelevant to what I'm actually trying to find. Google will probably just have another tab to click on, or perhaps a few top links to blog-specific searches if they think it's relevant (like they do with cross links to Google News searches currently). Perhaps even a configurable "Include Blogs" on the preferences page. Whatever, I don't care, just let me exclude the damn things.
If I don't get what I'm looking for in regular search then may go search Blogs as well. After newsgroups.
Bad Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Great idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
Think about it... I would love to search the blogosphere to see how widespread certain news items have become, or how widespread a certain opinion is...
You could use something like this to measure the spread of ideas (at least within a vocal and technologically suave minority).
Weblogs vs. the World (Score:4, Interesting)
Filtering out usenet news is relatively easy, but weblogs? Mhhh, I shall remain sceptical until I see it implemented.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:/. is a blog, no? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. SlashDot aggregates news stories. It's the Web generation of what the BBS guys had in CompuServe Forums and GEnie Roundtables. The staff is paid to aggregate and thread stories that are of interest to a particular community. (Sometimes they aggregate the really, really good ones more than once.) Technically, SlashDot staff don't submit the stories, members of the community do. Bottom line: it's a professional operation. (g'head, g'head, make the jokes, it's Monday, get 'em outta yer system...)
Personally, I would use the litmus test of "professionalism" when doping out what is a blog versus what is "legitimate" content. If the "blogger" makes his living as a writer or journalist, then the blog is "supplemental online material." If the site is, as we referred to the vanity publishing phenomenon back in the early '90's, someone's "homepage," but with the added baggage of semi-regular diary entries, then it's a Blog.
Use of "blogging software" doesn't make someone a writer, or a journalist, and it certainly doesn't automatically grant its user something worth saying, or even something factual to say.
It's great to see Google realizing this and clamping down.
Re:journals (Score:5, Interesting)
You're entitled to block them if you wish, of course, but if the ads don't consume too many bits, and bring the site-owner some moolah, and don't interfere with your browsing, how does blocking text ads help?
Knee-jerk ad-blocking will only kill free content on the net, imho.
Re:Weblogs vs. the World (Score:2, Interesting)
What if it looks like a blog, but has nothing but on-topic posts (whatever the news-site's topic may be)? It has too many opinion spots, though, so it can't really be purely news. Does the fact that it's about a subject, and not some person mean it's no longer a blog?
The line between Blog-NotBlog is so fuzzy at times, I don't see how they can fairly make a distinction.
After all, in a way, Slashdot is just a blog for the editors. Certainly some people would consider my sites blogs.
Re:ID? Categorization algorithms! (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a wealth of categorization systems out there. Generally, they "position" the sites in an imaginary, highly-dimensional space, depending on whether keywords occurr (and how often/prominent etc.), and on certain structural properties of the documents. You can then try to define separating hyperplanes, which are functions that devide the ("feature") space into separate compartments, so you can group documents together.
Usually, these systems are trained on a set of sample documents that are already categorized, in this case, for instance, a thousand blog pages and tenthousand non-blog pages.
An example for this would be Support Vector Machines [kernel-machines.org] and Joachim's text classification algorithm.
Relevant keywords (from the field) to look for include "Maximum Entropy Models", "classifiers", "categorization", "Bayesian *" (whatever), "Neural Network Classifiers", "Data Mining"...
Re:ID? (Score:3, Interesting)
O yeah, one more thing, Google bought Blogger, so that's another way they'll be able to tell.
Re:Personally.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I've found this mechanism to be really effective in helping me find what I want.
I use the google toolbar - this defaults to a 'web' search. 95% of the time what I'm looking for comes up on the first page. If not, I can click on the 'groups' tab, where my search is repeated (like when I'm trying to figure out an error message or somesuch).
If the thing I'm looking for is a business, or a product or something likely to be listed, then the 'directory' tab will give me good results.
Having a 'blog' tab (and keeping the results out of the main web results), seems like a good arrangement to me. Most of the time I'm not interested in results from blogs, and it doesn't seem too much extra work to just click one more time on the main results page to repeat the search in a blog-specific area.
I've found some of the best information on blogs.
I think it depends on the kind of info you are searching for. In my experience, most of the blog results aren't helpful. I've wanted a way to filter them out (usually putting in -comments -posted or similar helps).
ephemeral content (Score:4, Interesting)
but filtering out ephemeral content in general would be good -- blogs would be included in this. so would mailing list archives, news stories, online stores, auctions, discussion groups, etc.
when i'm searching, i almost always prefer a page that somebody authored and put up as a permanent resource (or as permanent as the web allows). the top-level pages of the ephemeral sites would probably be good to keep in the main index, though i'm not sure how you index, e.g., the /. homepage.
-esme
Re:blogs.google.com? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:journals (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah well, your option. Some people do find ads matched to the search to be a useful feature.
Re:journals (Score:2, Interesting)
In google's case, I'd say the service is worth the slight inconvienence of the ads.
Re:Ummm... no (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, I guess I shouldn't have specified live journal. My guess would be that easy publishing websites (blogger, live journal, etc...) are more often (but not always) used by people who just want an online journal. Also, the name "live journal" implies that it's a journal, not a blog.
In fact, my first 'blog' was hosted on blogger. It was mostly a journal. Then I switched to hosting it myself with more advanced software (movable type) and my blog migrated into a more news-oriented feature. As a result, I split [privon.com] my blog into a more journal-oriented blog [privon.com] and a news/science/politics blog [privon.com].
I agree completely that a blog is about getting what you want to say out there. That's what I use mine for. I was merely responding to a comment that indicated that all blogs were just about mundane things that happened during the day.
neurostara limiting interface IMO (Score:2, Interesting)
Include Web-pages: [X]
Include Blogs: [ ]
Include Usenet: [X]
And so forth. You can get better combos this way, If they add other "web types" in the future, you can combine searches without having to go to each one. They could still include a dedicated listing if they want, but I hope they don't hard-wire their data that way to prevent or reduce multi-factor searches in the future.
Even more generic would be to have a pull-down list of the "strength" of each search. Thus, if you wanted weblogs included, but given less weight, you might assign it a lower number. Zero would be the same as a no-check above. However, this is perhaps too confusing to most users.
How about if... (Score:2, Interesting)