Death of the A-list blogger? Not exactly. Is blog search currently on life support? Yes. Does this affect blog traffic? Yes. Is anyone analyzing this situation holistically? Uncertain.
Over the past several months:
1) Technorati has “redesigned” in such a way that other content, especially mainstream media content has become more prominent.
2) Sphere has done much the same thing and it’s widgets seem to favor mainstream media content.
3) Live.com and Yahoo! don’t currently have blog search at all.
4) Ask.com blog search is on the homepage but few know about it.
5) As written previously, Google has a decent blog search but has not yet put blog search on the home page.
Based on the increase in traffic when Google moved Video to the front page, I firmly believe that a change to Google’s home page to include blog search would yield an immediate increase in blog traffic – regardless of social network sites.
Is Google on the side of the mainstream media or the average blogger? Time will tell by their action or lack thereof. Can we revive blog search?
Another way to look at it is that blogs have become ubiquitous and accepted as the ‘other mainstream’ type of webpages, thus making it accepted as all other types of searches.
Jeremiah,
If that was the case blogs would be merged with news completely!
David,
The only problem with that is that most blogs aren’t really news sites. I do wish that Google put blog search on the home page.
Bryan
Bryan,
This is a good point worthy of another blog post – categorization of types of blog content and blog authors has great potential to do much good.
If you’ve looked at Google News lately, you’ll see some examples that they’ve forgotten what news is too. That again is another issue.
For now, I’m focusing on the hiding of blog content from the average blog user. This is a cause worth fighting.
[…] In other words instead of blog search they decided to get into the universal search game with all together different rules. What happens when Google moves blog search to the homepage? […]
I am not sure what you mean by Google not having blog search on their home page. Blog search is the first option under the “more drop down” in the upper left hand corner.
But it doesn’t matter. Blog posts are now included in the regular Google Web search.
Search for “iphone village phone” and you’ll find my blog post is the first result.
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