Today Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, and for the first time, its not just search. They’re surfacing top blog clusters. There are some interesting reviews here and here. I have a different take on what they’re doing and why, and I think we’ll start seeing these clusters in a few other places around their web site, like their web search page.
Right now, they have a few high-level categories, and some simple clustering to surface major topics in the blogging world. The clusters, like this one, are sized well, give you a nice chart, and have the usual blog noise, nothing too surprising. Clustering isn’t trivial, but they already do a fine job with news, so I’m glad to see them port some of this over to the blog section. Before this launched, it seemed like blogs weren’t getting much love, and not fully benefiting from the skills of their Google News team. Its using a similar URL pattern for cluster id’s that Google News uses (“ncl” for news, and “bcid” for blogs — news cluster id, and blog cluster id, and the numbering scheme seems the same). Blogs are still off in its own sandbox, and it seems that it would not be too hard to link major blog clusters to major news clusters. I suspect that, relatively soon, we’ll start seeing exactly that: blog clusters on their News section, and on their main search page. You can look at blog posts from within a news article cluster, but it seems to have no relation to what’s going on with their Blog search page.
Could they have included blog search results on their main web search page now, and more heavily in their news site? I suppose, but blog clustering makes it easier. Much of what Google does incorporates page rank, and blogs and news aren’t as amenable to that sort of treatment, and splogs can gum things up. Clustering however is a good way to surface things that are new and significant, you just have to pick good representatives from the cluster when you decide on a title and who to link to. You also have the problem that, in relying on clustering, you will always be lagging others, since you have to wait until the momentum has already developed.
Right now, if you use Google to search the web for Gwen Ifill, the first result says “News results for gwen ifill”. But if you search for Geraldo Rivera, it doesn’t have a news slug, and just links to Wikipedia. Perfect, Geraldo isn’t big in the news right now, but Gwen Ifill is. How did Google know that? Clustering! Now that they have clusters for blogs, they can do the same with them. But they need to be cautious with their web search, so I suspect they’ll let blog clustering run for a while before incorporating it. Before that happens, we’ll probably see them rolled out to Google News, perhaps associated with news clusters.
Significantly, actually searching for blogs does not leverage any of their clustering work. At the time I’m writing this, the top blog cluster is one on Gwen Ifill, but searching for “Gwen Ifill” doesn’t show the cluster. So the underlying search seems to be unchanged. Cluster size however can help a great deal when sorting search results. Why aren’t they leveraging clusters with their search? There’s probably a technical hurdle there, or perhaps they just need time to back-process all of the blogs back to 2005.
They also have an API that lets you tell them about a new blog post. Great. Its not like they really need it, they’re Google after all. But its a friendly thing to do, and it makes bloggers feel like they’re a bit more in control and that Google is working with them.
Posted by Ken Ellis 
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