Google Still Working On Making Blog Search More Relevant

It has been almost three months since Google Blog Search began indexing full text of the page and, since then, there have been numerous complaints from searchers and webmasters.

The majority of the complaints are that Google Alerts are coming up for irrelevant or outdated blog results. In addition, many blogs are no longer indexed quickly anymore. Plus, Google is indexing blogroll code and including them in the link command results.

Jeremy Hylton from the Google Blog Search team updated the Google Groups thread saying that Google will be conducting “visual experiments early next month” that will start with the link: queries and focus on “blogroll detectors” in the matching algorithm. Personally, I am excited to see improvements with Google Blog Search.

Why do I care? Well, I care for a few reasons. As a searcher, I love being able to find relevant and fresh blogs with content on topics that I am looking for. I know that I am missing key blogs in my discovery process and I can’t wait for the results to become fresher, quicker, and more relevant. Yes, I know, easy for me to say, but hard for an engineer to make happen – good thing I am not a Google engineer.

In addition, I often track who is linking to the articles I write. This way I can see what people are saying about my stories and help clarify my stories when necessary. I often do that by watching Google Blog Search for queries on names such as Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable or RustyBrick. I also use the link operator to find out who is linking to my stories on either Search Engine Land or the Search Engine Roundtable. And ever since November 2008 the link operator in blog search failed for me. Then it got worse when they tried fixing it and got somewhat better with their second attempt towards the end of December.

I know many searchers, webmasters, and SEOs who would love to see future improvements. So I hope this early March update will make for a better Google Blog Search, as Jeremy said it might.