Internet search giant Google has overhauled its tool for searching the Web's massive number of blogs, with a  major update released Wednesday to the Mountain View, California-based company's Blog Search service that added subject categories, graphs and other changes aimed at making the previously spartan tool a more interactive way to find writing on what it called a "massive mix" of blogs. Google Moves From Simple Text Box To Graphs And Browsable Categories Google Blog Search, initially launched as a test service in September 2005, had consisted of a simple text search box for finding information on blogs before undergoing the update that was announced Wednesday by Google product manager Michael Cohen in a message posted to the company's blog. "Today, we're pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere," Cohen wrote in the Wednesday announcement. Google has changed the focus of its Blog Search service, which now operates as an entire Web site and not just a search page, to providing consumers a way to browse through categorized news and information written by bloggers from a wider variety of blogs than has been possible using rival services. In a Web environment where critics see ever more chaff than wheat among online information, whether the variety the new Google Blog Search has begun offering proves to attract more consumers or to drive them away remains to be seen. The SearchEngineWorld image to the right shows the previous Google Blog Search Web site next to the new version launched Wednesday. Cohen said that the new Google Blog Search, which was launched for English language users initially, contained "cutting-edge (and sometimes unverified) news stories," and "topics often ignored by the mainstream media." Google said that it planned to offer Blog Search in additional languages over the "coming months," and could eventually grow to rival the 40 regional editions available to Google News users worldwide. When Google Blog Search first launches in 2005 it offered, in addition to English, support for French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean, a much wider selection than the new version announced Wednesday. Underlying Code Partly Based On Google News Yet Different Focus The new Google Blog Search was based in part on Google's popular Google News online media information tracker, which provides categorized news from thousands of Web sites operated by newspapers, news services and other media outlets that are typically more well-established than the type of average blog the new Google Blog Search has indexed. Although some information was available using either Google News or the new Blog Search, such as technology articles from specialist Web sites VentureBeat and GigaOm, the two services cater to different audiences. "Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories," Cohen said of the method Google Blog Search used to break down blog information by subject into what the company called "clusters." These clusters have given Google Blog Search users a way to find information from many blogs relating to any of the service's 11 subject categories which include international and United States news, politics, business, technology, movies, television, sports, science, entertainment and a section specifically for information about video games. "When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere," Cohen said of what was the first major reworking Google Blog Search has had during its three year life. Techmeme And Slew Of Rivals Get Mammoth Challenge From Google A new graph accompanied each of the main site categories on the revamped Blog Search site, showing how many bloggers have written about the same general subject during each hour of the past day, a feature that could be helpful for those spotting trends. While hundreds of rival services offering some of the features of Google Blog Search already draw large groups of users, none could claim to come close to matching the mammoth size of the world's most popular search engine company Google, and it was more the entrance into the so-called "meme-tracking" field by the search titan that drew the attention of the industry rather than any individual feature of its new service. Services billing themselves as memetrackers generally look to find the most popular new information from within the ever-expanding number of blogs and present it to users in helpful ways. With at least 900,000 new blog messages being written each day according to a report recently released by Technorati called the "State of the Blogosphere," Google and its vast network of search indexing systems may have more success than rivals in providing a full spectrum of information from blogs. The new Google Blog Search faces a slew of rivals led by Gabe Rivera's Techmeme, Guy Kawasaki's Alltop, Technorati, FriendFeed, Thomas Marban's popurls, StumbleUpon, freshnews, Memeorandum, Yahoo Buzz, Six Apart's Blogs.com, and New York Times' Blogrunner. Google Overhauls Web Blog Search Tool Google has not disclosed exactly how its new Blog Search attempts to rank and categorize information from blogs, however some aspects were listed in the help section on the service's new Web site. "Blog Search uses a set of algorithms to try to determine the most popular stories in the blogosphere," according to the Google site. "We consider factors such as a blog's title and content, as well as its popularity throughout the rest of the blogging community. Then we display groups of posts that are closely related," Google added. The system employed by Google placed those blog stories it considered the most popular on the front page of the new Blog Search site, and offered users the ability to browse blog information by date or author or from only certain blogs. Some industry observers have criticized the new Google Blog Search, which was developed by a team of Google blog search engineers based in New York, for throwing such a wide net in looking for new blog information that some spam and content copied without permission from so-called "scraper" Web sites was being included in the mixture shown to users. Google quality control engineer Matt Cutts said the new Blog Search offered "categories (world news, science, video games) that you won’t find on Techmeme or its sister sites," while presenting a "browsable version of what’s going on in the blogosphere." Cutts said that the new Google Blog Search offered a new way to look through blog information. "On the Blog Search home page, you can keep clicking the Next button until you get tired of going deeper," Cutts wrote in a message posted Wednesday on his own personal blog. Related Links :
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12:29 am on Oct. 3, 2008 (utc 0)