Will Google's new blog search tool make it easier to find blogs?

I see from Bob Ambrogi and Tom Mighell that Google's new blog search tool has launched: http://blogsearch.google.com. (Update as of 9/15: Mighell, still on the story, reports today that "not a day after Google introduces its blog search tool, Yahoo! sends a shot across the Google bow with its new Instant Search feature." More.)

Both bloggers noted the speed of Google's blog search, which my searches demonstrate as well. Minghell puts it well:

"Google finally unveiled its Blog Search tool last night, and it's pretty nifty. I have run a few searches on it, and I am primarily impressed by the speed -- this thing is fast. It doesn't have the same bells and whistles as Technorati (not yet, anyway), but it also doesn't take a full 20 seconds to run a search there either..."

I was particularly interested to read this excerpt from Google's FAQ:

"Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you'll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well."

You can, of course, search Technorati and Feedster in any language you choose, but I do like Google's advanced search page, where I both choose my interface language and limit my searches to pages written in these language: Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish and Turkish.

Will this new tool make it easier to find blogs? I think so -- if only for the fact that the search page is cleaner, simpler and I can indeed target by language. That ease does not, however, resolve this user's need for tools that equip me to conduct far more to accurate and adequate blog spelunking than any of the tools currently at our disposal allow -- as Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort, danah boyd, Julie Leung, Koan Bremner and I have written before.

Onward!

Comments

[jenB]

i just spent an hour or so reading what some of the folks at the end of your post said. it's great to read what i can't put into words. :-)

[Lisa Stone]

Yes, they're brilliant, aren't they? Thanks Jen!