Google Blog Search: The Internet Search Industry Shake-Up

September 14th, 2005 is a momentous day. It signals one very large step toward democracy in media.

Today the internet search world was transformed with the debut announcement of the Google blog search engine. Google is the first major search engine to offer a blog search service. The others are expected to follow within months. As a small time blogger, this was exhilarating news to wake up to.

So much for all the speculation that Google will be buying one of the blog search leaders such as Technorati, PubSub or IceRocket. (See the previous note on IceRocket here). The future suddenly does not look so bright for the smaller independent blog search engines anymore. How will they possibly be able to differentiate themselves or compete with the resources of the three search giants (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft)? Of course, they will be acquired eventually. But now it's less likely they can command large premiums. Their main value may now reside in the accumulted skill base of their founders and employees.

On second thought, it's not just the big three search engines that would be interested in the assets of the little search engines. Maybe some of the world's largest newspaper companies or other media companies should show a lot of interest soon before it is too late for them? Maybe there is a big premium there after all...

For now, the Google Blog Search only searches blogs with feeds. It actually only searches feeds for now. Unless you submit the full content of your blog article to the feed, Google is only capable of searching the contents of the first few sentences or so of your blog entry; -– it is limited to the contents that show up in the short form of your feed. Additionally, the indexing only goes back a few months, so earlier articles on your blog will not show up in this search engine for now.

I see that the Blog Search box has also been added (very prominently) to the main page of the Blogger Dashboard. This has huge implications. There are at least 1.5 million people who blog with Blogger. (Does someone know the actual number?). Many of these people are not the least bit interested in official news sites, at least not on a daily basis. It's quite conceivable that this search box, found conveniently on their dashboard, will become their main and perhaps only source of search from here on in.

Overall, on initial testing, it looks like a fabulous blog search service. And if everyone is agreed on the demand for and relevancy of including the freshest news or gossip in search results how long can it be before Google adds the blog search capability to their main search page?

Go directly to Google Blog Search here.

See the initial reviews about this development here.

See more speculative notes on where Google is headed with Blogger here.

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