San Francisco — Google Inc., barely six years after it launched Google News, just last week revamped its Blog Search tool with an enhanced blog tracking service that helps people mine a growing mountain of online commentary for gems worth reading, following a format similar to sites like Techmeme and the NYT’s Blogrunner.
Google Blog Search finds new blog posts and clusters them by topic.
The Google Blog Search tool introduced this week contends with Techmeme, Polymeme, Wikio and other “memetrackers” that sort and organize blog posts into categories.
“Did you know that millions of bloggers around the world write new posts each week? If you are like me, you probably read only a tiny fraction of these in Google Reader. What is everybody else writing about? Our Blog Search team thought this was an interesting enough question to look into,” Google Product Manager Michael Cohen wrote in the company’s blog.
“We are pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere,” said Cohen.
To answer that question, Google found a massive mix of entertaining items about celebrities, personal perspectives on political figures, cutting-edge — though sometimes unverified — articles, and a diverse range of niche topics. Google Blog Search seems to be attempting to pick up where the traditional news media stop.
Google’s updated Google Blog Search tool will employ similar technology that powers Google News to track and organize the 900,000 new blog posts added to the Web every 24 hours, Google said. Previously, the tool only allowed users to simply type queries to search blogs.
“We now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event,” Cohen, in a blog post.
The site organizes content by relevance of title as well as popularity in the blogosphere. A lead category Friday morning at Google Blog Search was the debate that occurred the previous evening between US vice presidential contenders Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.
An icon with a picture of the political rivals indicated that 1,620 blogs were compiled in the category during the previous 19 hours.
The lead item was a Huffington Post piece saying ex-officials from the administration of US President George W. Bush believe Biden won the verbal duel with Palin.
“Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives," Cohen said in his online message. “When you look within a cluster, you will find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.”
Categories on Google Blog Search include politics, technology, business, science, entertainment, movies, television and sports.
While the site is introduced only in English, Google said it plans to eventually add support for more languages.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, a blogger at Read Write Web, compared the new Google site with others that aim to do the same thing. “It is cleaner and less spammy than Technorati, it is more transparent than Yahoo Buzz, it is more inclusive than Six Apart’s new Blog s.com. So the big question will be whether it is faster than Techmeme.”
He added that Techmeme, which primarily tracks technology blog posts, has an audience that is more influential than it is large.
Techmeme is huge in the tech community, however, and should not lose too many followers, but Google expands the functionality across 11 different categories and has to the potential to reach out to broader audiences who are not so niche-oriented.
Speed at picking up stories will be a key factor in determining the site’s success, but it is not really about the competition as the site should benefit all bloggers by providing yet another portal for driving traffic.
“The new Google Blog Search has the potential to reach tens of millions of people and drive insane amounts of traffic,” Kirkpatrick noted. “Techmeme indexes a limited number of tech blogs, primarily blogs linked to by other blogs that are already indexed. Google Blog Search, on the other hand, indexes all blog posts faster than anyone else on the Web.”