Blogsearch, Google's Neglected Property Options

[bwelford]

I recently did a search on Google's BlogSearch for Microsoft Matches Google In Voice Mobile Search. Look at the following items, which appeared at positions 8, 9 and 10 in the report.



Items 11 and 12 were very similar to these three. How can Google, which prides itself on its search algorithms, possibly present results that are clearly meaningless. To add insult to injury, these items were created with the free Blogger blogging software offered by Google since they all are located on the Blogspot domain.

This is not the first time I have seen such nonsense items in BlogSearch searches. You might have thought it would not be difficult to work on the Google BlogSearch algorithm to avoid these definitely sub par results.

Why does it happen? Perhaps since BlogSearch does not produce revenues, it does not get corporate attention. It doesn't even make it to the main Search page. You have to click on More before you'll see the link. That's a great pity. RSS news feeds are an important part of the online world and it would be useful to have a search facility that performs well.

What do you think about this?

[EGOL]

Blogger is a haven for spammers. A lot of junk gets posted there. I have long been amazed that google allows this to exist on their domain. However, I can say that a lot of these garbage pages are deleted if you click through to them. If the same junk was on another domain it would not rank well in their SE.

This post has been edited by EGOL: Oct 20 2007, 02:36 PM

[kensplace]

After cleaning up listings in my blog directory, I found that the majority of dead, and junk/non updated or spam blogs came from blogspot.
A much higher percentage of blogspot blogs were deleted than any other provider. (I may try and keep some figures next time, so I can see exactly what percentage etc)
As for the results in the google blog search, Im not suprised, Im finding that even googles main search results are pretty crazy now, I did a search for 'blog directory' and im on page who knows what (it changes from 7 to 12 to 16 to 7 etc) and I have thousands of links, yet directories with only a handful of blogs in, virtually no backlinks etc are way ahead of me...

Thankfully google is not my only source of traffic, I get a large percentage from other sources, but the results for the query in question seriously make me wonder what google is up to, even ask.com gives better results....

The number one position at the time I searched was occupied by a site that forces reciprical links, DMOZ directory for weblogs was on page 16, after mine, the results are just plain crazy as far as I can see - and thats the main google results.....

This post has been edited by kensplace: Oct 20 2007, 10:07 PM

[bwelford]

It gets worse. Look at a Blogsearch I did this morning for a new blog post. The search was for Advanced IVR Is Winning Out. The first 9 results are all those nonsense Blogspot blog pages.

Is whoever in charge of Blogsearch asleep at the wheel?

This post has been edited by bwelford: Nov 13 2007, 02:46 PM

[bragadocchio]

I have my preferences set for 100 results, Barry.

There were very few pages that weren't spam in the top 100 results for that query. And most of those bad results seemed to come from blogspot.

Not good at all.

[rustybrick]

So who has blog search right? Yahoo? Live? Ask? Technorati?

[bwelford]

I'm trying Sphere again.

[Ruud]

So who has blog search right? Yahoo? Live? Ask? Technorati?

None of the above, as far as I'm concerned.

With blog search it's like everybody is starting all over again with search. Some, like Ask or Live, are not specifically bad but they're often not relevant in that the source is not a blog. Forums, PC World, product feeds, etc.

For a while adding +trackback helped a bit but no longer either.

[amanda123]

Blogger is just like haven for spammers.Lots of people gets posted there because their posts can not be spammed...

[bwelford]

I don't know who else uses Blogsearch but I note this morning that the nonsense blog posts seem to have disappeared. Unfortunately the order for the other entries does not seem all that logical. I don't find the top ones are necessarily the most relevant to my queries.

Does anyone else use Blogsearch and if so, what are you finding?

[rustybrick]

Read/Write Web has a piece on this now http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/blog_...uietly_dies.php

Guys, start using Ask.com's Blog Search and let me know what you think....

[bwelford]

Well I removed the Google Blogsearch from my Favorites toolbar this morning. It's too broke to waste any more time on it.

I did check into that link you gave, Barry S. For the search I was doing, Technorati was of little help. The Ask Blogsearch was better. So that is now on my Favorites toolbar. Let's see how it goes.

[bwelford]

Just to comment on how Ask Blogs search is going. I'm finding it does all that Google Blogsearch used to do, but does it in a nicer format with more functionality. It found a post I just wrote and put it at the top, where it deserved to be based on content, etc.

That used to happen with Google Blogsearch. I couldn't even find the post in the top 100 and there were the usual proportion of the nonsense blogpost posts to add insult to injury. I assume they've gone to the regular Google algorithm, but it just isn't working. I've given up waiting for them to get it right. I guess Google will have to either abandon Blogsearch or make a fanfare when they relaunch it and get it right. Life is too short to keep checking it.

[rustybrick]

I am still giving Ask Blog Search a go. I use it via RSS searches, so some bad results make it in but overall, it doesn't feel like typical poor quality blog search results to me.

[bwelford]

It gets curiouser and curiouser. I did a blog post this morning on competition in the Canadian cell phone market. Within hours it appeared at #1 in the Ask Blog Search and at #1 in the Google regular Web search. However in the Google BlogSearch it appears at #5. Can anyone figure out the logic in that?

[iamlost]

Can anyone figure out the logic in that?

You dis the BlogSearch, it returns the favour?

[yannis]

I can still see quite a bit of 'spammy' results from here. Some of them are just pages with an iGoogle interface for the query Barry posted.

It is like the main results 2 years ago!

Yannis

[bwelford]

Just to update current info on Google Blogsearch, which is increasingly dropping into near invisibility on the Google shopfront, it is now indexing blog posts in some cases very slowly. This may be a response to the hacking of many blogs that has been evident during the last weeks of January. That's just a suspicion on my part.

Blogs on the other hand have star billing on the regular Web search. I assume Blogsearch is being starved for resources and all the efforts are going into algorithms for the regular Web search.