Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Exclusive preview of Yahoo's browser-based email based on Oddpost.  

PS: Yahoo Mail works with Firefox/Mac, it does not work with Safari. 

Watching Google's blog search for a few hours, it doesn't seem to have a concept of page-rank. The order of the results seems pretty random.  

NPR has a podcast about the Roberts hearings. I caught a bit of it yesterday and it was really interesting. Surprisingly so.  

Forbes is looking for, but hasn't found the profits in podcasting.  

Paolo spots Googlebot reading his RSS feed. 

Google adds blog search 

search.blogger.com: "Search blogs from all over the web."

It's also available at http://blogsearch.google.com/.

A FAQ page is also available. Memeorandum is tracking it.

Google Blog Search search query for "google blog search."

It appears to be searching the RSS feeds. Based on a little experimentation with recent content, it's not very useful as a search engine for this weblog. If a post doesn't have a title it doesn't seem to see it. It actually picks up posts on my ancillary sites better than those on this site. Example. It's good that they support RSS output (it was sure to be a frequent feature request) but once again they ask the user to make a choice of output formats, they really need to get this -- users don't care. And they're breaking Postel's Law.

They might want to look at the weblog search engine for Scripting News, an application of the Google API. Really they shouldn't depend so heavily on blog posts having titles. Really need to give this some thought, I think you punted too early.

It's good that they're using weblogs.com output, and give it credit in their FAQ (something Technorati, for example, doesn't do, preferring to claim credit for our work). Speaking of Technorati, okay, Google's blog search isn't perfect, but now there's a benchmark to compare against. It sure performs well. Let's see if they can keep it running (my guess is that they can). Politically, Google is making the user pay for their religion, so that's a point in Technorati's favor. Neither company is much-loved in the community these days, but in balance I trust Google more, which is pretty amazing, considering how small Technorati is. We knew the day would come when Technorati would have to compete with Google. They could have prepared much better for this day, imho.

Scanning some of the Memeorandum-gleaned links, Google's should do a better job working with bloggers. We do more than publish summer salad recipes and Harry Potter reviews. If any bloggers were briefed in advance, none gave it a thorough look. Also, the timing is obviously designed to steal some of Microsoft's thunder. Maybe we could move beyond that. We want to look at what Google is doing, for sure, so please give us a chance to do that, even if we won't write puffball pieces about your work, and let Microsoft speak too. Maybe even let them have a week to communicate their product strategy.