WebmasterWorld and Tom Raftery mentioned the new Google Blog Search almost simultaneously. Yes, it’s nice. Yes, it’s way faster than Technorati. No, it hasn’t all features of Technorati (yet). Yes, :tz: is listed. Yes, I like it.
Sounds like a “me too” post? OK, here comes the beef:
Via Google Blog Search (which really should be called Google Feed Search, because it lists feeds as well), I found a posting on an Australian blog for one of my employers “money terms”, which never popped up on my radar before! It was a rather harsh (but honest) end-user report about one of our products, and it came to me raw, unfiltered. I commented on the blog and I contacted the author, and we had a rather interesting email conversation. I raised awareness for the issues at hand, and I got a better understanding of this specific end customers needs. Something I get – if at all – only filtered by various levels of distribution hierarchy.
So Google Blog Search made my day. Within the first minute of using it, it brought a valuable link to my attention, which neither regular websearch, nor Technorati, nor Pubsub brought to my attention before. Go figure!
Michael,
I am finding it is giving better results than other blog search engines for the few searches I have done as well.
Some people are reporting more spam sites found – I haven’t had this experience yet but don’t doubt it is an issue that Google still need to do some work on.