Google Blogs & Other “Front Pages” For The Blogosphere

When Techmeme opened in 2005, I’d found a new online newspaper to begin my day with. It quickly and neatly organized top stories as reported by various blogs and news sources for the area I cover. But if you weren’t into technology, you seemed kind of out of luck. Now Google Blog Search has stepped in to bring Techmeme-like organization for all subjects buzzing in the blogosphere. Below, a look at how it compares along with other resources such as Technorati and Blogrunner.
Major Search Engines & Blog Search
Google’s new service has only been out for less than a day, so I don’t want to go overboard with expectations. But blogs have largely been abandoned by the major search engines. Back in late 2004 and early 2005, there were huge expectations that the majors were going to do “something,” plus they dropped plenty of hints that blogs were indeed an area they were going to focus on.
Google finally kicked things off with Google Blog Search in September 2005. Yahoo followed in October, though blog listings were integrated into Yahoo News rather than be a standalone service. At some point, Microsoft allowed for searching of RSS feeds, and more was expected.
Since then, Yahoo’s “temporary” removal of blog search in mid-2006 has continued. Microsoft had feed search through the middle of last year, but it was dropped at some point after that. Google Blog Search continued on, but it remained keyword-based, search driven. That’s fine when you want to seek out news on a particular topic. But what if you want to discover what’s hot, the latest buzz, the latest “meme” that’s out there? That’s where you want memetrackers, as some call them.
I prefer to think of them as places that gives a newspaper-like front page summary of what’s happening. Google Blog Search — or Google Blogs, as you’ll see I think it should now be called — provides a new such front page. But let’s start in understanding it by looking at some of the others out there.
Technorati
Technorati is one such service. It has changed over the years to get away from being a search-driven site to providing a browsable interface. But the service has never taken off with me. I don’t find myself going there on a daily basis. In part, perhaps that’s because it has changed so much so often, I don’t know what to expect (last year, it changed in May, September and December 2007).
Looking at it again today, perhaps I should spend more time at Technorati. It groups many blogs into different categories. I can get a front page for technology or for the 2008 Election, for example. Both show me top “headlines” for those areas, plus headlines overall across the blogosphere are listed on the Technorati home page.
There are several things I dislike. For one, it’s all kind of “blah.” Stories all feel coequal, so I don’t really know what to take in first. There’s also a lot going on. Do I want the “Headlines” tab or the “Rising Posts and Stories” section?
I also don’t like that if you click on a headline item, such as an article about Apple dropping NDAs for iPhone developers, I don’t get to the article itself. Instead, I get a “reactions to story” page showing me what other blogs are saying about the story, plus — if I want — I can do another click to the story itself.
I do like that there’s a mix of blog content and news content. These go together often in the way that opinion pieces and news stories go together in a newspaper, though many blogs have news content as well. I can see On the left, “rising blog posts” and alongside on the right, “rising news stories.”