Google has a new search page (blogsearch.google.com, but really www.google.com/blogsearch) that focuses on Blogs. It resolves the issue of how to tell the difference between a blog and another site by indexing off of RSS feeds/pings, which limits its history a bit (back to about June), but is a fairly neat bit of behavioral filtering.

Though, interestingly, it still seems to require crawling, vs. actually reading the pings. Does the feed/ping simply tell Google to include it in its blog crawl (or its subsetting of the sites it already crawls)? The site says that it indexes feeds, but that doesn’t explain why posts of mine from yesterday aren’t there. (It also raises questions about sites that only feed a limited number of words, or that don’t feed comments, both of which can be search-worthy and neither of which I do.)

My main concern with this is that some folks, including Google, have made noises in the past about blogs and blog results in Google proper obscuring “real” information sources. Granted, depending on the topic you might find actual news items buried amidst wingnut and moonbat rantings on the same, but I often find information presented in or pointed to from blogs much more searchable than the original news sources (esp. when blogs quote news text that slips away thereafter). If this new Beta service from Google is meant to make searching just blogs easier, great. If it’s a first step toward ghettoizing blogs out of the main Google search, I don’t care for it at all.