What can be learned from the improved “Google Blog Search”?

October 2nd, 2008 by Dr. Taly Weiss

Filed under blog citation, bloggers, google, icerocket, information, internet behavior, Nielsen BlogPulse, search, tagging, Trend Spotting Behavior

Earlier this week, Google re-launched “Google Blog Search“, presenting recent most popular stories discussed in blogs, according to specific categories (Politics, US, World, Business, Technology, Video Games, Science, Entertainment, Movies, Television and Sports). As it groups related stories into clusters, you can easily track what’s currently hot in the blogsphere. A timeline graph is added to the popular clusters to show you how the story is gaining momentum during the last few hours.

How can we benefit from Google Blog Search?

1. Google Blog Search as a source for popular news:

Many have discussed the similarity to Google News or Techmeme, capturing the most popular topics to be discussed in the blogsphere.
Read Write Web suggested “Google Blogsearch has the potential to reach tens of millions of people and drive insane amounts of traffic“.

Actually, I’m not sure that as a news source it has a life of its own. If it can serve as news resource – why not have it as a part of Google news?

2. Google Blog Search as a trend tool:

We can consider Google Blog Search as a tool to track popularity in blogs. In this case – why can’t we receive clustering and popularity results over any search query (not only for those found as recently popular) or choose any time range to be displayed in the graph? If Google Blog Search intends to serve as a tool – it can learn much from BlogPulse and IceRocket tracking abilities.

In the meantime, what can we learn? Not much actually. Mainly that Sarah Palin is still a popular item. See how her unwitty interview on cases brought to Supreme Court is catching popularity in blogs in the last 12 hours.

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