She's often very verbose in her postings, and I can't often read every one of them. But each one is often well crafted. The point by Scobleizer is interesting, if true. I've been moaning about the lack of search capabilities for a while now, but I never thought that it should be server-side.
Wow. You leave your news aggregator for a couple of days and Google goes out and buys Pyra, the company that created Blogger. Pretty big news, but I have to admit that my first thought is that this is a mistake. As much as I love Blogger, I don't think Google needed to do this.
Of course, the advantage to blogging this story late is that I can read and comment on others' opinions.
Anil Dash: "More to the point, Google's consistent marketing message so far has been, 'We do search, and we don't want to be a portal'. ...the reality is that it puts Google into a far different role than they've had so far."
-- I agree with Anil, and I'm worried that this is a sign that Google is branching out into an area that isn't integral to that mission.
Nick Denton: "Expect to see, first of all, that Blogger-powered sites show up in Google search results minutes after the posts are published, rather than days."
-- Actually, this wouldn't impress me at all. If Google can't evolve to do this for sites outside of its domain, then it will lose its edge. We're getting to the point where we already expect this.
Scobleizer: "So, Google has a HUGE vested interest in making sure that the weblog communities survive. Let's say that Pyra went out of business. Google would loose much of its competitive advantage (and Microsoft probably would be able to move in and improve its search offerings and maybe even offer its own weblog tool -- anyone remember that Microsoft already offers free Websites over at http://groups.msn.com ?)"
-- I disagree that this is Google's motivation. Plenty of great companies went bankrupt during the dot-com era, and Google can't go around saving them as part of a business plan. They either have something specific in mind, or it's an experiment (one that could fail, a definite possibility since I wouldn't consider Froogle or Google Answers to be successes so far and they don't take up the company's resources that Blogger will).
No Time to Think: "The concept of the 'next big thing' has been building and taking shape. Its the theory of the 'Semantic Web'meets the power of 'Google' meets the value of 'Reputation'. Call it the 'Global Clique' (although one will exist for each subject) - everyone knows everyone (either directly or indirectly), someone knows everything and lots of people know where to find it or who to ask, there is no specific or consistent relationship between the participants (they're loosely coupled), and the thoughtleaders and the influencers - both in general and on specific subjects - are clear. It just needed a push. Today it got a huge one."
That last one sounds better to me, and I hope that's where Google is headed. However, the great thing about Google - and the benefit that made it integral to our everyday lives - is that it searches "everything" in a distributed fashion and uses the pagerank algorithm to rank the results, all in less than one second. Adding blog link trails to Google News is a great idea (Jim McGee has a good summary), but they should have been able to do this without purchasing Pyra. Their advantage has always been the ability to index and rank content in the outside world, not on their servers. Even if they plan to add this type of functionality into the Google Search Appliance that they sell for big bucks, I would have thought it would be more impressive if they did it in a distributed fashion, without purchasing a blogging company.
My hope is that they'll build a better search engine for individual blog entries. For example, right now I'm trying to find a site that I blogged about last year. It had an RSS sidebar integrated into the main page. When you click on one of the sites listed in the blogroll, that site's headlines opened seamlessly in the sidebar. Earlier tonight, I was trying to remember if it was Gateway or Dell that is making integrated 802.11b standard on its laptops. I had a heck of a time finding it in Google or Daypop (if you're interested, I finally found it in Dell's press releases). What we really need is a more granular search engine for finding content that is unique (the thoughts of bloggers) but not unique (general concepts that are blogged by one, thirty, or a hundred people).
I'll be interested to see how this plays out, but I still think Google is missing the boat by not working closely with librarians. If they truly want to become THE place to go for information, they should continue their work on the semantic web, but there will always be information that they can't provide. The way to fill in those holes is to create a librarian-based pagerank and integrate 24/7 library virtual reference projects into their offerings. A good librarian will thrash Google Answers any day of the week.
Just imagine searching Google for something, and not finding what you need, being unsure of a site's authenticity, or tiring of paging through thousands of results. What if you could type your postal code into a box on the search results page and be connected to your local library's virtual reference service? Suddenly you have an expert at your fingertips, as well as access to subscription-only databases. Tell me that wouldn't rock!
[The Shifted Librarian]
