Google relaunches Blog Search as a less-good version of Google News

October 1, 2008 | Anthony Ha

Google just rolled out the first major revamp of its Blog Search site, most notably adding a Google News-style homepage. Basically, it’s yet another way to see what people are talking about across the web.

Product Manager Michael Cohen has posted a detailed explanation about how the new homepage works, but it would have been more useful to just say, “You know Google News? It’s like that, but with blogs.” Posts are divided into categories such as politics, technology and science, then all the posts on a specific topic are grouped together in clusters. So if you want to see what 98 different blogs say about Apple dropping the nondisclosure agreement for iPhone application developers, Google Blog Search is the place to do it.

I’m not sure, however, how many people will see this as a useful alternative to Google News or tech news aggregator Techmeme and its sister sites. If you compare the technology pages on Google News and Blog Search, they cover pretty much the same stories, except that the top stories in News come from sites like MSNBC and Reuters, while the top stories in Blog Search come from blogs like Late Night Wallflower and Epicenter. (The Google News tech section also includes a lot more stories about space travel, since it groups science and technology together.) And since many blogs are news sources, there are sites that show up in both News and Blog Search, such as GigaOm, VentureBeat and some of the blogs written by The New York Times reporters.

The overlap underlines the fact News and Blog Search are doing the same thing — it’s just that News does a better job of filtering. That’s not meant as a knock on any particular blog. But when I’m looking for news, I prefer to see articles from the familiar sources featured on Google News and Techmeme, rather than a flood of blogs I’ve never heard of.

I suppose there may be an audience for Blog Search’s “every blog in the world” approach to aggregation, but I’m definitely not part of it.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony Ha writes about enterprise technology, cloud computing, tech policy, and random cool startups. Before joining VentureBeat in January 2008, he worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. Anthony attended Stanford University from 2001 to 2006, and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com.

  • nikhils
    Somebody had suggested this feature on google news group on Nov-2007 http://groups.google.com/group/news-Suggestions...
  • Nice -- that was you, I assume?
  • Maybe Google will deliver faster and index faster than Technorati.
    And less fail whales.
    The better Quality of Service will win in the end.
  • Hm, I actually like the approach they offer as the majority of blogs that break stories are usually the familiar sources - same as they are on Techmeme. And since the focus is different for Techmeme and Google News with the former focusing a little more on web apps that would have remained unnoticed on Google News completely, I will definitely keep an eye on it as an addition to Techmeme for now.
  • Yes, I'll probably keep an eye on it, just in case, but I'll be using Google News and Techmeme a lot more.
  • True, I also think we will still stick to what we are already accustomed to - but this new product also seems to have an interesting future provided that Google fixes a few things about it.
  • The problem here is that they rank results by authority and authority in social media is less important- any tiny source can break a story or rumor, get picked by others and create news. Their approach will not pick up these small sources...
  • Are you referring to Google or Techmeme? Sorry to be dense.
  • Actually both- search in social media (which we sorta do) is a completely different animal. Techmeme seems increasingly less relevant to me because I almost never see a story there that I don't already know about.
    And how would Google sort through Tweets, for example? We've got something like 70 million of them in our social media warehouse...
  • Yeah, I agree that news aggregators should be looking at Twitter. Re: Techmeme, I wish I could say the same, but I guess I'm not as plugged-in as you!

    PS Getting back to your initial point, I do think Techmeme does a decent job of highlighting the initial news source, though it's sometimes slow to do so.