The latest “big news” from Google is their roll out of Google Blog Search, which allows search for blogs by topic. With the old BlogSearch, your search term resulted in a list of all the URLs that match that specific term.

With the new system, you can also view results by domains rather than specific posts. Just search for something in Google by clicking “Blogs,” then in the left-hand panel of your search results, click “Homepages.” (Here’s a sample search for “mommy blogs”.)

How Pages Are Ranked

Google says: “This is especially useful if you’re looking for bloggers that post on an ongoing basis about the subject of your query.” That’s Google’s way of saying “We’re not spilling the beans about how we rank or giving away the goods on why we display the results in any given order.”

Metrics That Matter

When it comes to Internet monitoring and data collection, the big challenge – and the most important goal – is trying to come up with metrics that matter to you or your client. Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb likes the new BlogSearch concept but wishes Google could provide better depth of metric. He hypothesized one way he might approach it, which involves some programming and a lot of leg work.

Now excuse me while I geek out on you for a minute. For businesses like ours, who are in the business of providing social media monitoring and business intelligence gathering for a myriad of clients, being able to access Google Blog Search in a logical way would be terrific—for us and for our clients. The problem, however, is that Google doesn’t care for data-gathering services doing what they consider to be “scraping” data from their site. And to prevent this, Google has templates for how their HTML is generated and they change them on a regular basis to keep this from happening. So, while Marshall’s method would work for a one-shot effort, it’s unsustainable for long-term projects. You can code against it, run it, and Google will have changed the formula by the time you try to run it again.

In our case, it’s somewhat irrelevant. At Spiral16, we already have the infrastructure and methodology in place to collect this kind of data, combined with our own internal metrics to rank the relevancy of a site by topic.

We’re excited about these advances in search and look for more to come. And, like Marshall, we love the concept of Google Blog Search and look forward to Google continuing to innovate. The next step is coming up with ways to make metrics like these flexible enough to meet clients’ needs.

Tagged as: blog, blog search, blogsearch, Business Intelligence, function, google, google blog search, homepage, Marketing, new, Social Media Marketing, topic