Google Blog Search

Google launched its new blog search engine today. I first read about it this morning at John Battelle's blog and the AP's story hit the wire this evening. Already there are a ton of posts on this hot topic (see it in action - search on "google blog search" at Google Blog Search.)

I want to make a couple of points:

1. Google's blog search engine indexes XML feeds instead of the blog's HTML, so make sure you have a feed at your blog. Anil Dash at Six Apart informs us that Six Apart offers an automatic feed of all public posts to LiveJournal and TypePad, so you're covered if your blog is at either of those services.

2. This really bodes well for our users who are writing product reviews and embedding affiliate links. Google's regular search engine included blog posts but now you have a better chance of getting more visibility at this specialized search engine.

I've played around a little with the new blog search engine and while I don't understand what goes into Google's relevance algorithm, I was happy to find some of our users' product reviews at or near the top of search results.

I also saw that our (very early stage) Zoundry Reviews Portal made it to the top of a few product searches. We haven't really done much with it yet, but our goal with the portal is to collect digests of product reviews from our users and create a product review search engine. Consumers will be able to conduct product research (especially out on the long tail) at our portal and then click through to read the full review at our user's blog and purchase through our user's affiliate link.

If Google's blog search engine does a great job indexing our users' blogs, then maybe we won't need to expand our portal. But then again, we have a few search optimization tricks up our sleeve that may give Google a run for their money. More on that later...

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