Google Blog Search

» see blogsearch.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2005 there was enough blogging on the internet to justify a search engine that did nothing else. That sentence needs saying out loud now, because it stopped being true so completely that the product it describes looks like a category error. Google Blog Search searched blogs. Only blogs. It was the first major engine to do it properly, and for a few years it was the fastest thing Google ran.

I was at university when it arrived and the reading list was blogs. TTNet put broadband in the house around 2006 and the thing that actually changed was not the speed, it was that a browser could stay open. What you did with a browser that stayed open was follow twenty people who wrote irregularly and never on a schedule, and the tools built for that problem were feed readers and blog search. Both of those categories are now dead.

The speed was the selling point and it was real. The Blog Search crawler hit new posts within hours, against the weeks that default Googlebot indexing took in that era, because it was watching ping servers and feeds rather than waiting for a general crawl to come around. You could sort results by date instead of by relevance, which no other Google surface let you do properly, and the advanced search had operators that main Google never offered.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Reviews in September 2005 were split in a useful way. ProBlogger liked the fast indexing and the date sorting. One reviewer called it freaking fast. Duncan Riley at the Blog Herald graded it in pieces, giving the search itself a B and the size of the index a D, then summed it up as Technorati with half the results and none of the error messages, which was meant as an insult and reads now as a compliment.

The complaint that mattered was spam. Blog search inherited the whole splog problem, thousands of machine-generated sites scraping and reposting to catch ads, and a search engine restricted to blogs is a search engine restricted to the worst-defended corner of the web. Google never solved it there. It solved it later by no longer having the product.

~ the long tail ~

This one died four times, which is unusual. Google announced on 26 May 2011 that the Blog Search API was deprecated as part of a spring cleaning post covering several APIs, and the standalone service went down with it. For years afterward you could still reach the index by hand-formatting the URL in the address bar, a trick that circulated among librarians and researchers who had nothing else that did the job. In March 2016 Google closed that door too.

Even then it was not quite gone. As late as February 2017 you could still get blog results by opening Google News and digging through the Tools menu until a dropdown offered Blogs instead of All news. Four clicks to reach a product that had been publicly dead for six years. By February 2021 the option had disappeared from search entirely. The last surviving trace is Google Alerts, which will still let you choose blogs as a source for a custom alert, quietly running against an index nobody is allowed to look at.

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