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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Google Blog Search Problems

I rely pretty heavily on Google Blog Search to help me find people who are citing blog posts of mine so that I can see that kind of conversation. Unfortunately, it looks like Google Blog Search has decided that they will now include the entire contents of the web page rather than just the contents of the RSS feed. What this means is that I now get links to every post where the author includes my blog in their blog roll.

This completely defeats my purpose. I want a nice clean RSS feed of any posts that include links to my various sites.

I can't tell if this is something that is intentional, but it's been happening for a while.

I actually left Technorati for Google because Google appeared to be doing a better job. Time to evaluate my options?

Any suggestions on what to use for this?

8 comments:

Paul said...

Well, I don't have any suggestions myself, but this post was useful in that I'm really thinking about starting my own blog. This is good to know. I was wondering about Technorati, but was also considering Google and WordPress.

I know you've been on Google for some time. Has your experience here been far better than Technorati? Or was it due to a few specific features that made life that much easier?

Ara said...

The best solution is to use Google Alerts.

http://www.google.com/alerts

Check it out.

Ara said...

D'oh!

I went back and read your post a second time and I notice you want an RSS feed of the results.

That said, this is the service for you:

http://www.googlealert.com/

Check it out.

Tony Karrer said...

Paul - I'd think you'd look at Wordpress, Typepad and Blogger as your starting point. Technorati is more about aggregating and searching content.

Ara - does Google alerts search the RSS feed only? I do use Google alerts for certain searches, but not for blog searches.

Anonymous said...

Tony, I've noticed a somewhat tangential situation with WordPress, which I use for my blog. On the admin dashboard, I can see new links to my posts (e.g., someone posts "Dave said this" with a link).

Recently, however, I get those notices even when, so far as I can tell, someone's just tinkered with their main page or sidebar (in which my blog appears). In other words, I'd looked on this as "folks recently talking about me" but it seems to have shifted to "folks who have ever."

I haven't yet investigated to see if this impression is true.

Paul: I'm very happy overall with WordPress, and would be happy to talk about it with you.

Tony Karrer said...

Dave - I wonder if that means that Wordpress has been hit be the same thing. They must rely on someone's blog search. Might be Google.

Glad you pointed that out. And hopefully that means Google will change it back.

Ryan said...

If someone were halfway intellegent about designing RSS feeds, they would layer and stack the feeds or make them scalable and customaizable.

What would really be a nead idea would be to have the RSS dfeed customizable by each individual viewer through either prefrences or cookies and browsing history.
That way you could boolean the the RSS to display pertinent stories that you actually might be interested in. Or incorprate a wiki-like structure into the actual RSS feed.

Anonymous said...

Same problems been driving me crazy. I already use Google Alerts which is excellent for picking up posts where people don't link.

The way the links are coming in from Google Blog search in my dashboard is really annoying me at the moment. Changed one blog over to Technorati but it is even worse as it says some is saying.

I've found the best solution for me is to add my Technorati feed into Google Reader. The feed looks nicer and provides the information I need. So I will be advising our Edublogs users to use this feed into a Feed Reader and consider using Google Alerts as well.

Meanwhile I'm hoping Google realises the issue and changes how they are indexing because getting a link everytime someone writes a post if you are on their blogroll is really annoying.