Google Blog Search: Not Different Enough

A couple of weeks ago, I was commenting about a recent position paper by Marti Hearst, Matt Hurst, and Sue Dumais and asking whether blog search was fundamentally different from other information seeking tasks on the web.

Well, I read today on ReadWriteWeb that Google launched a new home page for blog search. Of course, I tried it immediately. Indeed, the home page was enticing, a portal style reminiscent of their news home page. But then I quickly realized that all they’d really done was copy their news design and applied it to blogs. Once you search, you’re back to what is essentially a ranked list of results.

It’s a clean, well-engineered implementation, but I was hoping for something different. I know that Google isn’t big on innovative search interfaces, but I had somehow imagined that they’d recognize that blog search really calls for innovation. So do news search and web search, but blogs, as commenters here have pointed out, make the clearest case.

Oh well, an opporunity wasted for Google, an opportunity preserved for someone else. Faceted, exploratory blog search, anyone?