Already established in the weblog market after having purchased Pyra Labs and its Blogger service two years ago, Google has quickly become what analysts are calling the 800-pound gorilla in the blogosphere.
In her own blog, Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li wrote that Google’s effective search and ranking technology will be "the secret sauce to Google's blog search success." She also mentioned several other major portals will be entering the blog search arena to compete with Google, which she believes will unseat the limited hold on the market maintained by Technorati, Feedster and IceRocket.
“Google is going to blow them out of the water," Li said.
Although Google’s original search engine included blog content, the search results weren’t differentiated from other websites, leaving them buried beneath higher traffic results. That will no longer be the case, according to Jason Goldman of the Google Blog Search Team.
“[This] will give users the ability to find out what it being written in blogs as they are being created,” he said. “Blog Search includes content from blogs all over the web, not just from our own Blogger service, and we're continuously adding new content, very nearly in real time.”
The new search tool doesn’t use Google’s famous “spidering” technology to find blog content, but instead monitors existing RSS or Atom blogfeeds, so only blogs that offer some form of web feed are picked up by the search engine. That may leave a number of the estimated 18 million blogs worldwide out of the loop, a fact that has been the only prominent criticism of the service so far.
Duncan Riley, a seasoned blogging expert who posts frequently on tech sites Blogherald.com and Threadwatch.org, said he was initially disappointed with the service, but quickly changed his mind.
"The pick-up time of posts is out of this world compared to the competition,” he said. “As long as they can broaden the number of blogs quickly, this is going to be the market leader very, very soon."
Google announced yesterday that it already has a blog index in the millions.
"Just like web search became more important as the size of the web increased, Blog Search will become more important as the number of blogs increase," said Jeff Reynar, a product manager for Google Blog Search.
Reynar said Blog Search currently handles blogs written in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Portuguese.