Google Blog Search Completely Revamped to Add Meme Tracking but Not to Kill Techmeme

A few hours ago Google updated Google Blog Search functionality with some very profound changes. When up until now the Blog Search represented mainly a usual search page dedicated to searching within a particular group of websites (blogs in this case), today the homepage of the blog search by Google is completely revamped to showcase the most popular topics right upon arrival.

The homepage now shows the most discussed stories in all topics (a total of 11 categories are present). Stories are clustered and ranked depending on popularity of a topic (that is calculated based on the number of blogs discussing them and time since the story first appeared). It is also possible to choose a particular category to see what’s hot in politics or technology or entertainment. Right now the hottest section is obviously politics since the homepage features political stories on the top three positions but the fact that you can always focus on the category that you are particularly interested in makes it easier to track exactly what you want instead of what is popular in the blogosphere in general.

Right now there is one big problem with the new meme tracker (that is described with the word “yet” in the introduction post so hopefully it will be fixed soon) - there are no options of subscribing to the top stories via RSS feeds while I think it would have been perfectly logical to offer the same subscription types as Google News where there are different feeds for different topics and for the top stories as well. Hopefully this issue will be addressed rather soon since this approach could add lots of value to those of us who stick to RSS readers for all our news instead of browsing any pages elsewhere. But for now the only option we have is refreshing the page to see what’s new and hot in the blogosphere.

The immediate comparison everyone in the technology blogosphere started to talk about is obviously Techmeme - our dearest aggregator of technology news where no one (but Gabe Rivera probably) seems to know how the algorithm operates but still everyone is excited about getting a Techmeme lead now and then.

After taking a close look at the Technology section on the Google Blog Search I have to say that I don’t really see Google Blog Search killing Techmeme any time soon simply because the two seem to have different focus: where Techmeme gives us a place to discuss our beloved web services and applications, Google Blog Search seems to be more focused on the same technology that appears in Google News - established technology companies, software and internet giants, gadgets, phones, and laptops. And while there are some obvious interceptions between stories present on the two services, I believe that they will have very different audiences and chances are that those of us who check Techmeme a few times per day now will continue to do so while Blog Search will teach what meme tracking in blogs is to the rest of the internet audience.

There is one thing where Google Blog Search could probably do better than Techmeme as it will obviously be less elitist. Where Google Blog Search indexes all the blogs, many of us are under impression that Techmeme has some list of feeds to select news from only so it takes some time for new blogs to be noticed and get to the discussion sections on the meme tracker. Google Blog Search will probably make it easier for new blogs to make their appearance here. But at the same time this is also a danger as well - without any manual control here we will have a chance of getting stories from splogs and even comments on blog posts that will be indexed same as posts themselves are. It will be interesting to see if eventually Google introduces some manual filtering into the system to avoid such situations.

In general I think that launching meme tracking functionality is a very logical move for Google given the fact that it only required integrating the Blog Search with Google News algorithm to identify new and related stories and push the clusters to users. Basically what we see today is Google News that only features content from blogs. And while I don’t see it killing Techmeme any time soon, it obviously is a nice idea for anyone who likes learning news from the blogosphere instead of traditional media outlets. One thing I know of is that I will now have one more tab constantly open in the browser - right near the one that I already keep for Techmeme. It will be interesting to have some diversity at the very least for now.