1) Spotting one of the “Google vans” (Is this it?) becomes the new Where’s Waldo.
2) Locating Street View imagery of one’s self intentionally doing stupid things for the camera on said van becomes a new measure of geek stardom.
3) [I'm half-way serious about this one] Google (or a partner) finds a way to produce a cost-effective collection platform that can be distributed to private individuals–who’ll be given some amount of compensation for periodically sending imagery back to Google–for the purpose of expanding Street View to those areas that might otherwise be cost-prohibitive to capture.
Based on the data in my Google Reader Trends, Between 28 April and 28 May 2007 I read an average of 103 items per day, and shared .7% of the items that I read.
Google has a wildly popular feed reader. And they presumably know a thing or two about ranking algorithms. Why not rank blog search results based on subscribership? Or, since they’ve surely already thought of something as groundbreaking as my previous idea, maybe up that weight a tad? Would this not do away with the vast majority of spam in blog search results? Or, are the sploggers in control of massive numbers of Reader accounts that they use to subscribe to all of their junk blogs? And, if they do dutifully subscribe to their junk blogs, would that not make auto-termination of said Reader/Google accounts pretty simple.
Wouldn’t Google have to try pretty hard to screw up something like this?
Within the past year, I’ve probably read a half dozen posts from legitimate bloggers complaining about spam blogs (splogs), the most recent being Raoul’s. Got me thinking . . .
Fact: The effectiveness (read: profitability) of splogs depends on their ability to attract visitors.
The obvious means to this end is search engine exploitation–craft your splog such that a search for a given subject lands visitors on your splog, as opposed to a truly relevant post on a legitimate blog. If I search for “raoul pop review,” try to lure me into visiting your goat porn splog under the guise of an article that really has something to do with a product or service that Raoul has reviewed. The easiest way to do this: leech content from his blog, which is presumably relevant and will rank (because it ranked for Raoul), and make a bunch of money off of Google and other advertisers as countless suckers fall into your goat porny trap.
There’s just one problem: You have to trick a search engine into luring profitable visitors, which means that you probably have to rank as high as (or higher than) relevant content.
Fact: I have yet to search Google for a given subject and end up on a splog.
And I use Google about as often as I use my phone [1], notebook, or desktop. Note once has this happened to me. I search–via the Google home page or my toolbar–skim over summaries of the first few results, click on the page that I think that I want to see, and more often than not my request is fulfilled. Thank you, Google SEO overlord(s). This leads to the question: How are people landing on splogs? Via blog searches, of course! And this is, I think, the problem.
Fact: I used Google Blog Search for (probably) the third time today.
Why? Not because I wasn’t aware of it–I’ve known about it for some time. And not because I don’t read blogs–I actually read quite a few, as evidenced by my shared items. I don’t use it because I find it utterly useless. If I want to find relevant information on a topic, I don’t care whether I find the information on a blog, corporate site, online encyclopedia, etc. I just want the information. Why would I knowingly limit my result set to blogs (and, as I now understand, splogs)? I wouldn’t, and I don’t.
Google’s default search interface does a fine job of returning relevant search results sans splogs, unpopular content and otherwise undesirable crap. If within those relatively-well-refined results there happens to be a blog post, then congrats to the author–your post has (organically) made its way to the top of the heap. Your post is relevant. Not “relevant, for a blog” or something equally limiting, but relevant based on content. Period. And relevance based on content is, I think, the very point of this whole “search” . . . thing.
I leave you with questions:
- Do we really need–and do that many people really use–these ancillary, medium-specific search systems?
- Other than the mega-bloggers using it to help sustain their I’ll-blog-about-you-and-you-blog-about-me-and-I’ll-blog-about-you-again universe, how are people using blog search to find information on a topic that’s more relevant than Google’s all-encompassing result set?
[1] This almost isn’t a blatant exaggeration. If it weren’t for Google Local and Google Reader’s mobile interfaces, I’d seldom (if ever) fire up that buggy, unbecoming mobile browser.