Google Introduces Blog Search

Overnight, Google has made the blog search space a lit­tle more com­pet­i­tive with their intro­duc­tion of a new blog search engine. New ones are also com­ing soon from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AskJeeves (that last one being the main rea­son behind their acqui­si­tion of bloglines.)

At first look, it seems to work fine. Blogs are eas­ily find­able, although it’s not clear what the rank­ing algo­rithm is.

One of the thing I’d like to see, how­ever, is for big play­ers like Google to start offer­ing a ping ser­vice. At the cur­rent time, every major blog search engine seems to be using Weblogs.com as their main alert mech­a­nism. Dave Winer has been extremely gen­er­ous in pro­vid­ing this ser­vice to the com­mu­nity but, now that for profit enti­ties are start­ing to use it, it’s time for them to step up and pro­vide some help here. Add to the com­mu­nity by offer­ing equiv­a­lent ser­vices and mak­ing them as avail­able as weblogs.com. Another way a com­pany like Google (or Yahoo!, or Microsoft (hey, Scoble, can you get involved here ), or…) could help would be to offer free host­ing on their server to Dave for the weblogs.com ser­vice. They have loads of band­width and servers and could pro­vide it as a ser­vice to the community.

All and all, a good first start and let’s hope that we’ll see some of the improve­ments I sug­gested soon.