Bing and the Death/Rebirth of Blog Search

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, despite being initially upstaged by Google Wave, has become the talk of much of the Web.

The reviews of Bing have been fairly mixed. Though most believe that it is much better than Live.com, the search engine it is replacing, most don’t feel it to be superior to Google in any meaningful way (though some disagree).

The interesting thing about Bing is that it seems to be very complete right out of the box. It has an Image Search, a Video Search, a News Searcha Maps Search and even a 411 service, most of it built upon technology left over from Live.com.

However, one kind of search is missing from Bing: Blog search.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Live.com didn’t have a blog search feature nor does Yahoo! (which had one previously). But the fact is a major new search engine has launched with a complete set of features but no blog search and, to put it bluntly, no one noticed.

Whether or not Bing is a major turning point in the search engine wars remains to be seen, but it almost certainly is another sign of the death, and possibly the future, of blog search.

Signs of the Times

Blog search has been struggling in recent years. Though it, arguable, isn’t as bad off as it was just a years ago, there are still many ominous signs.

First, Technorati, the premire standalone blog search engine, has been in a traffic slide since approximately one year ago according to Alexa (Compete, on the other hand, has Technorati’s traffic trending up).

Google, despite accusations of favoritism, does not display the blog search link across the top of its site, instead linking to news, video and image search results instead. Google had, at one point, included Blogs in that list until a reshuffle caused by the addition of the “Video” link in 2006.

Finally, there has been a very vocal backlash against the quality of blog search, including on MediaPost, Jim Kukral and even myself on the Blog Herald.

Simply put, blog search has been battered by inaccurate results, stemming largely from spam blogs, non-blogs with RSS feeds and a chaotic expansion that has outpaced what the blog search engines have been able to effectively parse. Worse still for blog search engines, as more and more use Twitter and other real-time search tools to find the breaking news, blog searching is finding itself pinched in the middle, less reliable than news searches and less immediate than Twitter.

With these issues, there is little wonder why Bing didn’t bother with a blog search engine or why Yahoo! has not resurrected theirs. Blog search, for the most part, is a wasteland and it is one that is rapidly finding its way into uselessness.

However, all is not lost for blog search. If one can look past the flaws and problems, it may actually have a bright, if very different, future ahead of it.

The Future of Blog Search

There has been something of a renaissance in blog search in recent months, most of it powered by Google.

It started when Google relaunched Google Blog Search in October of 2008, turning it into more of a Techmeme-like site, thus taking much of the focus off of the “search” aspect of the service. It continued in March of this year when Google revamped the its blog search in an attempt to make it both faster to recognize new links and more accurate in determining which links to display.

Though these changes made blog search more useful, they did not solve many of the ongoing problems with it. Blog search, even at Google, tends to still be very hit and miss, filled with repeated posts and inaccurate results.

However, this hasn’t stopped Google from adding blog search into their other search results, including their main search product and Google News. Though these integrations began in previous years, blog search has grown to become a staple part of both of these search offerings and one most users are familiar with.

It is this integration that may hint at the future of blog search. As search engines have gotten better and better at picking up new links, largely the result of faster crawling, the need for blog search has dwindled. Personally, I am usually able to find search results for my own articles in Google (and even Bing) within an hour of publication.

Though blog search is still technically faster, it isn’t incredibly so. If one needs information much faster than that, Twitter is likely more useful. Furthermore, as blogs become less and less a “sphere” of their own and more a part of the larger Web, the definitions of what is and is not a blog will only blur further, making the idea of a separate blog search seem superfluous.

While we may not be at that point yet, these recent integrations and Google’s upgrades to its blog search product indicate that it is taking this area of search seriously, though perhaps not as a stand-alone project.

Bottom Line

In the end, most bloggers, I suspect, get most of their traffic from the regular search engines, not blog search ones. Likewise, I suspect that most do the vast majority of their research and searching using those non-focused engines.

Though blog search has a great deal of potential to be a powerful tool, even with the recent upgrades and fixes at Google, the results are still littered with spam, duplicate content and off-topic posts.

Bing and Yahoo! may have the right idea, at least in the long run. With a good search engine, there is very little need or practical use for a blog-based one and, considering that such search engines are going to be mired with problems that are almost insurmountable, a traditional search engine with blog search elements may be the far better solution for both bloggers and searchers alike.

Blog searching may be dying a slow death, but as a part of regular search engines, it may become more powerful and more important than ever before.

Written by Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today
Posted on June 2nd, 2009 and filed under Search Engine Optimisation
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