Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site’s frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it’s subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site.
That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.
Today, Blog Search is finally adding these features. Each feed now offers its own RSS/Atom feeds, as well as an iGoogle gadget that integrates new top stories into your Google homepage. Finally, the site has added sections for both ‘Hot Queries”, which shows the most popular search terms, and “Latest Posts”, an unfiltered view of the latest blog posts indexed by the search engine. These last two features could be quite useful for tracking breaking news, especially given how fast Blog Search is at finding new blog posts.
Unfortunately, they’re not quite there yet. My biggest gripe is that the ‘hot queries’ and ‘latest posts’ sections are not category-specific. In other words, when I’m browsing through the Technology section of Blog Search, I’m still being shown new posts about McDonalds, Exxon, and Asteroids. The Hot Queries section is equally irrelevant. This is especially strange given that Google is already categorizing the blog posts into different sections based on their topic, and I’m hoping that Google will at least offer a filtered view as an option.
Much needed enhancements. I have always found Google Blog Search very useful. These features make it so much better.
Hm, odd that they wouldn’t have them filtered from the start.
On another note, I expect Hot Queries to fall prey to Google Trends-like gaming.
I noticed that “new jersey transit” has been in the middle of the hot queries list for at least the past couple of hours, but it’s impossible to tell why if you click the link. I had to click over to Google News to figure out that service on NJT’s Gladstone Branch was knocked out during the AM rush because of a fallen tree. None of the Google Blog Search results were of any use. (That is, unless you clicked “Sort by relevance.” In that case, only the third result out of 10 on the page was related to the outage. Go figure.)
I didn’t even know they had a blog search… I shouldn’t brag.
Another drawback is that they only provide RSS feeds for maximum of 100 results. For popular topics, this may be just 1 day or 1hr of data. So even if you put a date range, you may not get all the data if there are over 100 results.
One more problem I found is that ,when you are looking for a particular blog type ,say Technology or politics ,It does not change the hot querries and latest posts accordingly on the right hand side .I would like to see them according to my category .
http://tekunik.blogspot.com
I wonder theyre going to finally release their people search.
Rss seems a lot of us a lot of convenience.
All right。
It is good to see they have made a lot of good changes to Google Blog Search. However, as you mentioned this is a error they should not have made!