Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Google Launches Blog Search Engine--Jams up Blogger Home Page

If you haven't already read about it, Google launched a beta version of its new Blog search engine both at its own URL and from the Blogger home page. Search Engine Journal has a nice piece about it here.

Two things about the new search engine from this fleablogger's perspective: starting from the URL, the searches aren't much different than those at IceRocket.com. So, it's looking like a "what's the big deal?" thing.

Not too long ago we didn't have anything to adequately search blogs. Sometimes if you did searches on Goolge or Yahoo, you'd come up with blogs. My main blog would come up in alot of funky searches. I wonder if that's going to continue, or if the separate blog search engine on Google (and soon to be on Yahoo! from what I can tell) is going to stop that. To some degree, it's a good thing--as I always hated getting blogs in searches for specific subjects, as many of the blogs are, like my main blog, personal in nature and not authoritative at all. (Frankly, form my perspective, blogs aren't authoritative on anything...the authority of a blog is always contingent on the reputation of the blogger, not on the blog's content alone).

The second blasted side effect of Google launching its blog search engine on both a URL and Blogger is that the darned thing clogged up the Blogger log-in page for most of the morning and afternoon!!! A tool meant to make blog searching easier clogged up the same site that I use to post blog entries! Talk about ironic.

So, with its strangle-hold on blogging, advertising on blogs, gmail, a chat feature, and now a new blog search engine, it appears that Google is positioned to become the new Evil Empire without offering us anything we can't find somewhere else that works far better.

Gee, guess I was a bit wrong about Technorati being the Evil Empire. We'll see...

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