Too many ancillary searches?

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.