Google Blog Search Update

[This is late, but I’m getting back to my normal posting rate…]

Google recently updated their blog search home page to include analytics over recent blogging activity. The update is essentially an application of clustering similar to that found in other memetrackers and on Google’s news product.

In addition, drilling down on a cluster provides (can you guess?) a time series of attention around the topic (I assume these are the number of blogs per day in the cluster.

It is great to see Google pushing beyond the simple search interface to provide something more appropriate to (a certain use case in) the blogosphere. However, I’ve yet to find a graph that looks much different from the one above. I’m not sure what this means. I imagine that the clusters are not very dynamic – there is not clear set of interesting temporal signatures for the stories, at least not at volume that Google is crawling.

What we’ve done at Political Streams is to apply a similar sort of clustering, but to trend the content of the blog posts rather than the clusters themselves. This gives the user an understanding of both what is being discussed, and how that discussion is trending over time. Note also that Political Streams is not just limited to weblogs, which allows the system to surface news stories that are breaking in other social media ecologies before they even get to the blogosphere.

Comments

[MostEmailedNews.com]

fascinating!

- T

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