mediajunk

An article in The Register has created much consternation about Google's apparent plan to relegate blogs to a seperate tab in its search (like "Groups", the tab you click to search newsgroup content).

The move has not been officially announced by Google, although the CEO Eric Schmidt has stated that the search engine will soon offer a facility to search weblogs. Uh, okay -- but you can already search blogs using Google, just as you can search any other web content. The Register has interpreted the CEO's remarks to mean that blogs will thus be removed from the main Google search engine; users wishing to search blogs would, based on "precedent", have to click on a separate tab.

The Register claims that bloggers "are likely to welcome their very own tab as a legitimization of the publishing format." Really? From what I've read on their sites, bloggers are not keen on the idea, pointing out inherent anomolies, such as:

• Google will have to "decide" (by re-writing its site-crawling and -ranking algorithm) which sites are blogs and which aren't, though the distinction isn't always clear. Some sites are part-blogs, while some non-blogs are powered by blog software such as Movable Type.

• Putting blogs into a separate search could be interpreted as treating their content as less relevant than the content that exists on other sites. Isn't content simply content? Isn't it the user who ultimately decides whether information returned is relevant to his/her query?

• While anyone can publish a blog (thus, runs the argument, blogs tend to be full of inane drivel), anyone can publish a non-blog too. Just because someone has chosen the blog format for his/her site, doesn't necessarily mean that the site isn't informative or entertaining (or vice-versa). Consider bloggers such as Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, or Irish technology journalist Karlin Lillington. Some blogs are devoted to watching a particular social/cultural trend or phenomenon -- such as the Google Blog.

It seems that such a move would serve to lose Google some of its previously hard-earned trust. The following comment, from user Kackle to the Webmaster World forum, would hardly have seemed possible a year ago:

"The question for Google isn't whether blogs are worthwhile or not. It's merely a question of what sort of arrangement will sell more ads.

Anyone who hasn't figured out that Google is an ad agency has not figured out much at all."

I wouldn't go that far, but I do think that removing blogs from regular Google searches would be a bad move. But maybe I'm just biased?