Google has just launched a new homepage for its blog search that bears a strong resemblance to Techmeme, Memeorandum and their “memetracker” counterparts. The site displays a listing of the top stories from across a variety of topics including business, politics, technology, and entertainment.
Memetrackers identify emerging trends on the web, especially across blogs. They are often the best way to learn about breaking news stories, as they can automatically monitor hundreds (or more) news sources at once. Major news outlets and user-submitted content sites like Digg often trail memetrackers by days.
Google may well be able to leverage some of the technology it has developed for Google News, which identifies emerging news stories across thousands of sites run by newspapers, television stations, and other media sites. But at this point it’s too early to tell if Google Blogsearch will be more useful than any of the other memetrackers (or if its even in the same league). Much of its utility will lie in how often the listings are updated, how many sources it pays attention to, and how it assesses a blog’s credibility - a memetracker is only as good as the stories it presents.
Google may be able to create a useful tool, but that may not be enough to overcome the established leaders in this space. In 2007 the New York Times launched its own TechMeme killer, which has largely been ignored. There’s something about TechMeme which keeps bringing people back to it.
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Is it just me or Google is becoming Microsoft by copying good ideas?
Interesting, you are also doing some work in this field.
Yep. Deathstar II. A deadly combo when you innovate and copy at the same time. It was a slow march in overtaking Technorati, but the first version of blog search eventually took over and also produced better results.
Maybe it will be the same with Techmeme on this second version of their blog search.
This could be (do I dare say game changing) for blogs. Take what google knows mash up the concept of techmeme, it’s like the news page at google for blogs. I can’t wait to see what the other TC people will think of it. Congratulations to the google team.
another copycat from google but completely ads free, classical google move to kill startup by being ads free and self-promote through its search engine results. how is this different from msft? google is completely evil.
The first test: Which site will pick up this story first?
Winner - Techmeme, 10 minutes ago. Google Blogsearch still isn’t showing it.
An obvious step for Google to make however I do agree with the article’s comment regarding the lure of Techmeme. Sometimes when a brand or site is well established and more importantly, well liked, competitors will always struggle.
Jason, I read your definition, but I still don’t know what a “memetracker” is.
Gabe as you are well aware a memetracker tracks meme’s. lol, i just wanted to be the first idiot to bite at your bait.
a tracker of memes
Wikipedia article
It was coined by the same evil person who created the word “blogosphere”. I’d rather not use it, but couldn’t get “site that aggregates breaking news stories from across the web” to fit in the headline.
Jason, if the above criteria makes Techmeme a memetracker, then Google News is a memetracker too. BTW, that Wikipedia entry lists Digg, Technorati, and Slashdot along with Techmeme. My point: “memetracker” is a meaningless term. Also, it sounds incredibly lame.
Agreed on all points. But can you think of a better term?
Yep. “News site” works for me.
BlogGregator
It is quite interesting that Techmeme picked up the story faster than the Google tool. My guess is that Google probably still needs some fine tuning. Having built a memetracker previously, I had parameters which I could adjust which acted as decay constants for the scores of the articles.
If I increased the decay constants, the system would respond slower and need more evidence that a particular conversation was interesting before it would get presented. If I lowered the decay constant value, the system would respond much quicker, but have the potential to present things which might be less relevant. While I have no idea if the algorithms used in Google’s product and Techmeme are similar, my guess is that they are tuned to respond to the flow of information slightly differently.
That being said, if Google waits another three years before updating the service again, Gabe is in a good position as his presentation of the information is significantly better in my opinion.
Ben Ruedlinger
http://wistia.com
Wistia, Making Video Productive
I think it is quite obvious that TechMeme and Google Blog Search definitely have different focuses - and, thus, parameters that determine if a story is worth picking for a claster or not. My initial impression is that Google is more about gadgets and general technology while TechMeme often prioritizes various news related to web services. Thus the difference in time stories appear on the two sites.
I don’t think memetrackers have anything to worry about at this point.
How do I access that through Google Reader? I don’t want to have to go back to that page all the time.
It looks like it is work in progress and they only say that they don’t have RSS feeds yet - so I guess that must mean we will be able to access various categories and general top stories via any feed reader of choice at some later point. Though it is quite surprising this functionality is not available from the very beginning.
Depending on what you need i offer full RSS feeds of Google blogsearch and other sites organized by topic at http://weblivz.com . Will be interesting to see where Google go with this - i have asked them for feeds also.
Google is evil indeed!
It wont take long for us to see Google deciding who has the right to be private and who has not!
Kill Google!
I think that Google is going to enter all business slowly. Are they going to rule the world? Does our live specially on digital things is goin to depend on Google? Well as far as it help us to make our live easily i don’t mind. Just as long as they stick to their headline…Don’t Be Evil…Just an opinion from me…
Great news and Google is really ruling the internet now
is this change another 20% workload from the Google staff?
nice to see blog search improving, but still not as fast/accurate as techmeme.
google I think, can take this and improve on it.
http://gatesandjobs.blogspot.com/
It would certainly have been interesting to see what happened today if yesterday’s 200 point drop was not a glitch.
it seems like they have the exact same memes as techmeme.
Indeed, this is no threat to Techmeme or anyone else. It’s a clean, well-engineered site, but it missed a great opportunity to address the particular needs of blog search. Read more at The Noisy Channel.
http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=497
techmeme has an alexa of 100k . if google cant beat 100k something is wrong. for a site that is suppose to be on A list of tech sites an alexa of 100k is laughable.
You should probably include techmeme’s related site that cover baseball, politics and gossip, since this google site has multiple topics. Not sure it would make a difference, but you sound more bitter than logical.
^loser??????
Bitter i was stating a FACT techmeme alexa is 100k+.
What is bitter about stating a fact?
^retard!!!!!!
You left out the other sites in the “family” dipshit.
Would you prefer all four on the same domain in columns?
Would that make it simpler for you to understand that your comparison of techmeme to googblogsrch is imbalanced?
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Somebody had suggested this feature on google news group on Nov-2007 http://groups.google.com/group.....eeebe77f64
Google has just too many people to keep happy, techmeme just has to keep the techy guys happy. Once solution, unfortunately doesn’t always fit all. So I don’t think techmeme has anything to worry about yet.
And here are a few more
http://www.blogofy.com
http://www.techofy.com
http://www.zoppr.com
@Tinh: So you think it is great news that Google is ruling the internet? I think it is scary that I am completely depending on Google for the search engine traffic to my websites! One cannot set up a site without depending on Google for traffic and I cannot see how that can be great news.
hey Gabe, love techmeme, but let me ask you. If you think “meme” tracker is a lame concept, why did you name your news site tech “meme” ??
greetings from Chile
Looks like a FAIL to me.
Google found only 14 to 17 found posts as of 10/2/2008 about the “Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server” topic and mine wasn’t one of them, although it appeared on Techmeme. What’s really strange is no entry for Werner Vogels’ “Expanding the Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server on Amazon EC2″ post of 9/30/2008 or Jeff Barr’s “Coming Soon: Amazon EC2 With Windows Amazon Web Services” blog post of 10/1/2008, which are the authoritative posts for the topic.
For more details, see the end of http://oakleafblog.blogspot.co.....e-and.html.
–rj
The masses don’t even know meme’s exist, let alone use them. When they do, “Techmeme” won’t be the choice of the day. Google will win this over time hands down.
George
Google has been extremely solid with it’s searching algo development.
http://www.itosolutions.net