Thursday, October 2, 2008

Browse what the world is saying on Blog Search

Did you know that millions of bloggers around the world write new posts each week? If you're like me, you probably read only a tiny fraction of these in Google Reader. What's everybody else writing about? Our Blog Search team thought this was an interesting enough question to look into. What Google found was a massive mix: entertaining items about celebrities, personal perspectives on political figures, cutting-edge (and sometimes unverified) news stories, and a range of niche topics often ignored by the mainstream media.

Yesterday, Google launched a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, Google is now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. 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.

In this example, the green "64 blogs" link takes you inside the cluster and shows you all the blog posts for a story.


Google had a great time building the new homepage and they hope you enjoy using it. Please give it a try and let Google know if you have comments or suggestions. They launched in English only, but plan to add new features and support for more languages in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Digg!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I will hire you to do my grocery shopping!!!! Great idea! haha