Google Blog Search
If you’ve ever used a blog search engine such as Technorati, Feedster, or one of the many other blog search tools out there, you may be interested in Google’s newest offering: Google Blog Search. Unlike traditional web search services, blog search systems operate using a “push” mechanism rather than a “pull” mechanism. What this means is that rather than attempting to scour out and find every blog out there using spiders and crawling algorithms (the services “pulls” the information from the web), they rely on blog owners to “push” new information to them via RSS and Atom feeds. This reduces the need to re-index the same information periodically and also expedites the process of updating the index with newly published content.
In any case, the new Google Blog Search tool (released in Beta form in typical Google fashion) operates using this same technique as most of the existing blog search services out there. Early returns seem to indicate that it is similarly useful to all of the other players in this particular niche service industry. However, since it’s Google, I would imagine that Technorati et. al. are none too happy (and yet none too surprised) that Google has entered into direct competition for the services that they provide.
