Hindi Song | Google Blog Search - Not So Fresh

This is a snapshot of four stories that are currently ranked at the top on Google Blog Search as of now (October 6, 2008).

In case the fonts in the above screenshot appear small, let me give a quick summary – the stories are about Nokia’s new touch-screen phone, Steve Jobs’ heart attack, Sony’s new e-book reader and some commercial tool for converting video to audio.

Now compare the time when the same stories hit Techmeme home page.

• Nokia 5800 XpressMusic hands-on (published October 2)
• Apple Denies Steve Jobs Heart Attack Report (published October 1)
• Sony’s PRS-700 Reader Adds Touchscreen (published October 2)
• The fourth story obviously didn’t make it to Techmeme.

The Google Blog says that this new home page of Google BlogSearch lets you "browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere". That may be the ultimate goal but frankly, the product is nowhere close yet.

Another point: Google BlogSearch doesn’t offer RSS feeds and the site is written in some complex JavaScript so you no option but to visit the page manually.

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Hindi Song | Google Blogs Search Gets Charts and News Clustering

Google today released a new version of Google Blogs Search that displays the most important stories of the day in a cluster similar to what you have in Google News.

Link: blogsearch.google.com

The site is a slight mix of Techmeme and Technorati in the sense that you can get an idea of the all the hot stories from the home page itself and each cluster has a Technorati style chart showing how may blogs are talking about that story.

News clustering in Google Blogs Search

Charts in Google Blogs Search

While this is a great development, I will probably stick with the old and trusted Techmeme as the amount of spam content indexed by Google Blogs Search is way too high. Techmeme indexes only limited sources like Google News and is therefore very clean.

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Hindi Song | The Unnecessary Complex Design of Google Blogs Search

A somewhat disappointing fact about Google Blogs is that the site has been written purely in JavaScript so all you’ll see is a blank page if you try opening Google Blogs Search in a browser that doesn’t support JavaScript (like screen readers) or a browser that has JavaScript disabled - something that’s quite common on mobile phones.

No Google Blogs Search for non-JavaScript browsers

Maybe Google decided to go with a JavaScript-only site to prevent screen scraping or is it anything to do with Google Chrome that is known to render JavaScript faster than other browsers.

Another issue, as I mentioned before, is the amount of spam content in Google Blog Search. For instance, the following story is from a blog that is republishing content from TechCrunch.

Spam Content in Google Blogs Search

Surprisingly, that spam blog made its way into a news cluster on Google Blog Search but the original story from TechCrunch can nowhere be found. This I think is an important issue that Matt didn’t touch up in his article comparing Google Blogs with Techmeme.

Personally, I don’t feel that Techmeme has anything to worry about yet.

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