Newsletter

Google Blog Search updated

So, Google Blog Search just turned into something way more awesome. Still not incredibly awesome though. For it to be incredibly awesome, they need to add RSS feeds. I'll explain that in a bit.

The front page of Google Blog Search is now a feed aggregator, keeping track of the most popular stories currently on the internet, and is filterable by topic (on the left).

Yes.

This is exactly the sort of thing for which I have been relying on the Techmeme family of websites (Techmeme, memeorandum, etc). However, Google's solution is much more open to other categories. I think this notion of stories being independent from the feeds which contain them, combined with a measure of how many feeds are talking about a particular story, is incredibly important. This is a major stepping stone for my previous post on news aggregation.

The downside, of course (there's always a downside), is that Google's new feed aggregator is lacking in a bunch of fundamental features. Clearly this is just a homepage for their main product of "blog search," but it seems painfully clear that they didn't really want to put both feet into the feed aggregator market. I went to look for an RSS feed of the content on their homepage and in the specific topics, but they don't even have that. Whoa.

Google, add that. Please.

Update: Here's TechCrunch's coverage, and Google's original announcement.