THE EMPIRE GOOGLES BACK….Via Dan Gelfand, who provides some commentary of his own, Andrew Orlowski of The Register reports that Google is planning to remove blogs from their main search engine and give them a special search engine all their own. It will probably be something similar to Google Groups, their search engine for Usenet forums (formerly Deja News).
I guess this is good news and bad news:
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It’s good news because it gives us an easy way to search the blogosphere. This is something that I sometimes want to do when I know I’ve seen something in a blog but can’t remember where.
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It’s bad news because it means that ordinary Google users will no longer get referrals to blogs.
Overall, it strikes me as more good than bad. I don’t really care much if people come here via Google, especially since I suspect most of them don’t find what they’re looking for. There’s not much point in getting accidental traffic, after all, and I can certainly sympathize with people who are trying to find some primary sources but end up with page after page of blogs instead because our incestuous linking gives us artificially high Google ranks.
Oh, and here’s an interesting factoid: The Register estimates that blogs make up .03% of the web. I haven’t figured out yet if that’s good or bad.
UPDATE: In comments, Bryant of Population: One points us to Evhead, where Evan Williams says, “as far as I know, Orlowski is full of crap.” Just because Google is going to create a blog search engine doesn’t mean they’re going to remove blogs from the main site.
So, anyway, maybe it was a false alarm. We’ll see.
