Mark
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 Posted: May 9, 2003 9:47 AM |
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| On Monday, Google CEO Eric Scmidt announced 'Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as blogs'. Today, in Google to fix blog noise problem, Andrew Orlowski of The Register speculates that a new "Blogs" tab would also mean the removal of blogs from the main search results. As Orlowski notes, there are precedents for this, the "Groups" and "News" Google tabs. I think this would be a huge mistake. I think Doc put it best on Feb. 20: "I doubt Google would cull blogs out of the main search area (though perhaps they could). Blogs are too much what the Web is all about." As blogging has grown, the collective volume of many individual voices has grown, to the point where they rank high in Google, sometimes above their coporate counterparts. Orlowski calls this "noise", but isn't it really the sound of many conversations between real people? To me, Google doesn't seem like the type of company to value the corporate voice over the individual, but if they remove blogs from the main search results, that is exactly what they will be effective doing. After the Google-Blogger deal was announced, many speculated whether Google might give preference to Blogger sites in search results. Now, it seems that the opposite may be true. Not to mention the impact that it could have on the growth of blogging. If people don't find blogs in the main search results, their exposure to blogging will be reduced, and less people start their own blogs. When you control a huge portion of web search activity, your actions can have an impact on the cultural direction of the web community. While, like others, I welcome the idea of a Google blog-only search tool, it would be a tragedy if blogs were removed from the main search results. In an unrelated note, Dave Winer comments today on what it might be like if Google stopped covering weblogs. Of course, if Google does intend to seperate blogs from the main search results, it raises the question: how will Google know tell that a blog is a blog? |
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