Chaser HQ has written about the explosions of blogs in the past. From Wonkette.com to the dog blog, more and more people are blogging. As the latest stats from ClickZ indicate, the blogsphere is growing:
According to David Sifry, Technorati’s chief executive, the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003. The company tracked 3 million blogs as of the first week of July, and has added over 1 million blogs to its stable since then. Meanwhile, Pew Internet & American Life reports a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day.
However, one of the problems with blogs has been the ability for people to discover the contents of individual blogs. Most people use search engines to navigate the billions of pages on the Web. However, blogs pose a problem for most search engines.
Traditionally, search engines crawl Web sites, cataloging the content of the site. They visit the site, and then they move on. The problem is that blogs are designed to be updated frequently, in many cases throughout the day. As a result, a search engine which is not crawling the blog frequently miss much of what these journals have to offer, and as the Wall Street Journal reported, results have been mediocre:
The technology is still evolving and companies are still looking for the best way to track and sort blogs. Some services miss large numbers of blogs, while others pull up irrelevant sites.
Specialized search engines, such as Technorati, Bloglines, Feedster and DayPop, have attempted to capture blog content, but most of them have failed to gain a substantial following, outside of blogophiles and geeks.
That was then. And now there is Google, the 180 pound guerrilla [pun intended] in the search engine wars. Google has a blog searching tool (blogsearch.google.com), and the initial reaction from the blogosphere is positive. The folks at Six Apart, makers of the blog software Movable Type and the blog site TypePad, have already weighed in
First, the new Blog Search works. All the basic functions you’d expect from Google search results are present, including ranking results by date or by relevance. (Interestingly, the default is by relevance, like other Google searches, instead of by date, which is the default for most blog displays.) But more importantly, the advanced search offers powerful functionality such as searching by date ranges and limiting to individual blog authors, in addition to features like searching for words in a blog post title or by language, which have been deployed in the past on other services.
There are problems with Google’s approach, but now that Google is in the race, expect the other big players to soon follow.
For traditional media companies, Google’s entry into the market means one thing: lookout. Few people expected Google to become a major player in online news, but today it has six million users a month to its Google News site. Could Google do the same for blogs — open them up to a whole new group of people?
For many on the Web, the content of blogs was inaccessible. Google’s entry into the blog world may very well changes all of that. Millions of blog pages just became that much more accessible to the larger Web audience. Chaser HQ will continue follow developments, but if you want to get into the game, don’t wait.
