Google have released their blog search engine (in Beta of course).
Interestingly, the search result pages have both an Atom and an RSS version available (without the need for a Google developer key).
A few observations:
- Switching between sorting by relevance and sorting by date didn’t seem to return a different order of results
- Performing a search with link:benmetcalfe.com (to find all blogs that link to me) included posts from my own blog. I think most of the other blog search engines are smart enough to remove such superfluous results.
- Perhaps the most starling of all was that a search for blogs with a link to my site returned just 52 results. A similar search on Feedster returns 211. (yeah, ok, I realise I’m not Mr popular which ever way you look at it)
I’m actually a bit disapointed with this, so far from Google. I realise it’s in beta but we’re so used to Google Beta products, well, being near-complete.
They’ve also had enough time to get this going (with a head start if you factor in that they already have an existing site spidering system to power the backend).
What do others think?