Sandboxed Blogs get Seen with Google's Blog Search

Google launched their blog search earlier this week. This will have large repercussions on the entire internet search industry. I've commented on this earlier, but here lets look at some more interesting implications, including the new Google NavBar and the effect on sandboxed blogs.

Most people have heard of the Google Sandbox. Basically almost all new sites and blogs will not be found via Google search for several months. It's almost as if they don't exist as far as the Google search engine is concerned.

I started my first blog in December of 2004 and my second in February 2005. They are still not showing up on Google but they both show up for several keywords on the first pages of MSN and Yahoo Search. I've read that it takes anywhere from six to twelve months to escape the sandbox. I guess I will find out soon enough. My hunch is that Google's Blogger blogs may have to sit in the sandbox for longer than other types of blogs, because they are free and thus more likely to generate spam and scam contents. This would really be a shame if Google actually has a higher sandbox penalty on their own Blogger blogs. Does anyone else have any indications that this may be the case?

What is so exciting about Google's new Blog Search is that sandboxed blogs finally see some exposure. The sandbox effect does not seem to exist here. The Blog Search capability is limited of course, it only finds blog entries from the past few months and it only links to contents it finds in feeds. I would guess we will see a huge uptake in bloggers getting feeds in the next few weeks.

Most bloggers who already have feeds to their blogs have opted for the short summary form of feeds, and not for having their entire posts showing up in feeds. This is because we want people to come to our sites to read the full article and to look around some more. But the incentive structure for this kind of reasoning is changing now that we have Blog Search. Blog Search will only find the contents of your feeds, hence the service can only index the first few sentences of your posts, unless you've opted for the full feed. So, we can also expect to see a lot more people choosing the option of full feeds instead of short feeds in the next few weeks.

The Navigation Bar on Blogger blogs was also changed on the same day as the Blog Search debut. I've always resented the Blogger NavBar and wished I didn't have to have it on my blogs. But the recent changes make it much more appealing. For one thing, people can now search your blog, or all blogs and actually get some relevant search results from your blog, if your blog is in the sandbox. This option just didn't exist before. I had tried putting the Google Search box right into my blog, but that tool was useless with a sandboxed blog. The new NavBar changes everything. It should result in a lot more visitor traffic for people with blogs.

For these reasons, and the ones I mentioned yesterday, I'm getting increasingly enthused about the new Google Blog Search.