Kara Swisher puts her nightmare-vision glasses on and predicts that a series of Google acquisitions would be a terrible thing for Microsoft. She suggests that if Google were to acquire “Digg, moves onto, say, Spot Runner and others (Meebo, FriendFeed, iLike and even Slide?), focused especially in the online ad, messaging, online apps and mobile spaces” it would be a terrible thing for Microsoft.

I don’t buy the premise at all. Digg is no YouTube. Facebook isn’t even YouTube material if you ask me. So if Google wants to buy up all these companies, fine by me. It’s kind of like a major TV network buying up the top shows and moving them to their network to better leverage advertising. But like all good TV shows or restaurants, eventually they become the same old same old and fall out of favor. Digg is already on that downward spiral. Outside of the student market, Facebook is shows signs up banging its head against the wall too. Even eBay is looking mighty tired–outside of being a stained virtual-brick built online mall for small businesses.

I don’t think it would be a big deal if Google purchased all of these companies. Now it might help Microsoft short term I guess if Microsoft were the acquirer. But my guess is for whatever it would cost for Microsoft to buy them it wouldn’t be worth it.

To me, a much worse nightmare would be the trifecta of Apple, Adobe, and Yahoo joining forces. These three companies merged into one would rival Microsoft and Google.

First, it would solidify Yahoo’s foothold as #2 in search and very well might push it up to Google levels at least on the stock side as Disney comes into the mix. Yahoo wouldn’t just become mail.yahoo.com and a so-so content platform, it would bring in online content–much from Disney–like few others could deliver. Tied in with Apple’s platforms, you could imagine some rich experiences that few could leverage. Apple TV and Apple WiFi phones and Apple Chat and on and on could explode in popularity in a relatively short time.

Second, on the developer side, Adobe’s current developer strategy which is doing pretty well with Flash, Flex, and Air, but combined with Apple’s well-tuned platforms, it could become an even more compelling story. Just compare Google’s Android-home-run-aspirations or Microsoft’s psuedo-crossplatform efforts with .NET and Silverlight to this three way merger. Mix in Flickr APIs and similar possible online efforts in Yahoo and I think you have what could be a standing eight count for Microsoft and a couple years upset stomach for Google.

And third, an Apple-Adobe-Yahoo merger would help to solidify Apple not just as a consumer force to be reckoned with, but would help propel enterprise sales, in part because of possible tie ins with Adobe’s PDF/Acrobat strong holds. If Adobe can continue to leverage Flash and keep pushing Flex and Air in the enterprise and Apple’s hardware sales can go along for the ride, this could really challenge any of the Dell or HP packages at least in the US.

So yes, Kara, one could argue that Microsoft should try to swallow up every company it can before Google does so–and yeah, this might not be a bad thing short term–but this is by no means the worst nightmare for Microsoft. Of course, an Apple-Adobe-Yahoo merger is highly unlikely given all of the personalities. Kara’s prediction is more likely. But since we’re talking about nightmares….

When I switched my blog from Movable Type to WordPress, I double posted for awhile because many people, and TechMeme in particular, weren’t picking up my new RSS feed. Turns out Google didn’t like that and started labelling all of the links to my old blog as potentially “harmful.”

What a joke. What’s so ridiculous is that there are several sites that continually ripoff my content (in part or in total) and Google not once labels them as malicious. Is that because they have Google ads on them and spam or not Google makes money from them? I’m beginning to wonder.

Instead, Google thinks my blog is bad.

After months of asking Google to remove their warning from my site listings, I’m at an impass.

What should I do? Nothing?

I think not.

When you’re not treated well by a company, typically, what do you do? Move on. I think I’ve given Google enough time to address the issue. It’s been going on since February and nothing has happened outside of one email saying that it might take several weeks.

So here’s what I’m thinking. Google is so insistent on asserting that I’m bad, that I’m now asking myself why in the world I keep using them as my default search engine? Live Search doesn’t think I’m bad. Yahoo doesn’t either for that matter. It’s just Google.

I’m a little bit uneasy to remove Google search. I’ve been using Google for so long it’s like a lifeline. However, Live Search results are pretty good nowadays, so I think I could survive. Hmmm.

What do you think? Should I change all my search engine defaults? Or give Google a few more months and just take the slap in the face every time I search for my archived content on Google? Eh.

There are three, huge upcoming developer events: Apple’s WWDC, Google’s I/O developer gathering, and Microsoft’s TechEd. If you could only go to one event, which one would you pick?

I think the winner, for most developers, would be….drumroll….WWDC. Second place would be Google’s I/O. And in third–more appropriately last place–I’d say TechEd.

Unless you’ve already signed up for WWDC though, don’t pack your bags for it. For the first time ever WWDC has sold out. Yep, sounds like a bunch of other developers are thinking the same thing.

Google’s I/O sounds like an attractive alternative–in large part because it’s in it its early stages. That’s a great time to expand your network–by attending the foundation years of a growing event. Is there any doubt that as Google expands more and more into our lives that a Google developer event won’t become the event of the year?

And then there’s Microsoft’s TechEd two week event. What can I say? I’m not an IT guy so the IT tracks are not for me. And the developer week of the event, is so…well, IT minded with its certification sessions and all. I guess if I was working at some mega-corp on an Intranet system that was built around Microsoft technologies, I’d be game. But I’m not.

And maybe, even if I were, I’d ask: “Is there any reason to go to a Microsoft event?”

Now don’t get me wrong, I’d really like to talk with the Silverlight team about some things as well as the WPF team, or WCF for that matter (what ARE they thinking???), or even Office Tools team, yeah…I have sooo many questions, thoughts, suggestions. It’s just that I keep asking myself if investing $2000 in TechEd is where I want to be placing my bets. It’s a tough call. And that’s why TechEd is in third place in my book.

Now here’s the funny part: As a developer interested in Tablet PCs, in pushing the state of the art in user interfaces, with a passion for Robotics, with an addiction to tracking online news and community conversations , and on and on, you’d think that there’s so much alignment between my interests and Microsoft’s that there’d be something at a Microsoft event like TechEd that would drive me to attend. Again, not for $2000 there isn’t.

Don’t feel sorry for those putting on TechEd though. I bet there will be lots of attendees. There are lots of people using Microsoft technologies. So it makes sense that at a Microsoft-sponsored event there will be a lot people attending. There are a lot of people’s who’s salaries and businesses are built around Microsoft tech. It’s just for me, there’s no excitement for me around TechEd this year. Hopefully PDC will not fall into the same boat.

After TechCruch’s comments the other day about how terrific the new natural language aware PowerSet.com search would be I was eager to check it out. I was going to sign up for the beta and then I decided to wait for the launch. I didn’t have to wait long. It’s up now. Check it out.

I admit I am quite skeptical about the Powerset venture. The “core” of the product may be from Xerox Parc, but I’ve seen lots of people try to throw technology at search and see it come up short. My skepticism was telling me that this was to be another case.

Powerset is trying to leverage natural language processing to improve the quality of search. Rather than go for indexing tons of web pages they decided to focus on the semantics and what they could glean from Wikipedia (in one case). Half of this makes sense. The focusing on Wikipedia part. I’m completely guessing about the NLP side and from this part I’m guessing they focused too much on the NL and not enough on flat out the semantics regardless of any technique.

Anyway, so now that Powerset has launched I decided to do a 20 second test and I think many people will be surprised at the results, but not in the way you might think.

Here’s what I did. I searched for the difference between Tablet PCs and UMPCs:

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The results were much like I expected. It’s hard to tell if any of the results targetted the query I gave.

Of course, I was being a bit unfair with my question. So I split it up into two parts. First, I asked what a Tablet PC is:

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And then “What is a UMPC?”:

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It’s just my opinion, but neither sets of results are that good. And what’s with the semantic summary at the top of the query results? What does it mean for UMPC features to be “system and low.” And worse, what does it mean for UMPC to “takes” “flight.” I can guess, knowing what I know about the market, but why am I guessing? I am performing the query supposedly because I don’t know the answer.

I’m not surprised by the poor quality of these results though, because Wikipedia has a small draw and being community driven it’s going to have a disproportionate voice that doesn’t “get” Microsoft’s efforts. And as a complete guess I wasn’t surprised to see the UMPC and Tablet PC to fall into this category.

So unimpressed with my 20-second Powerset search I decided to try Google. I asked it “What is the difference between a Tablet PC and a UMPC?” Not too bad. From what I see the third link is to an article entitled “How to buy a UMPC or Tablet PC”. Hmmm. That might give me a pretty good description of the differences I presume.

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Not completely satisfied though, I decided to try Live. For the same query, here’s it’s results:

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My. My. Look at this. The first link is to a forum post that is titled: “What is the difference between Convertable and Hybrid tablets.” Kind of close in terms of it being a comparison, but actually the link is of mediocre quality and a bit off target. I’m looking for a comparison between Tablet PCs and UMPCs.

The second link is a another so-so match. It’s titled “So what’s the difference between the Samsung Q1 and Q1B?” Both of these are UMPCs. Not qiute right.

Link 3 is getting warmer though–at least the title is more suggestive: “Define the Ultra-Mobile PC.” However, if you follow the link to Gottabemobile, it’s more about what UMPCs are and their differences with low-cost PCs, such as the Eee PC.

Scanning down the page though, you’ll see several articles with titles including the phrase “what is the difference between…”. Although none of them are exact matches, this does suggest that Live Search is placing greater sorted emphasis on content that also contains mention of at least UMPC or Tablet PC. Not bad. In fact the bottom two links on the page are “Difference between a MID vs UMPC” and “What is a UMPC.” If you read through this article, sure enough it compares in bits and pieces UMPCs to Tablet PCs. To me, although the artile is biased towards talking about a UMPC, it’s hands down a winner.

(Note: The Live query results aren’t very good if plural keywords are used, such as Tablet PCs and UMPCs. So the stemming logic in Live isn’t so hot. Not terrible. Just not as good as it could be.)

Yahoo search with the same query gives a valient effort too by strongly matching against the phrase “What is the difference between…” However I dont’ see articles that are strong matches, although I do see mentions of Tablet PCs and UMPCs which lead me to believe that with a little digging I might figure it out.

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I also tried Ask.com, but the results weren’t that good though there is a sidebar in which you supposedly could narrow the search by clicking on “Definition of a Tablet PC” and “What is the Tablet PC used for.” Of course, the narrowing list doesn’t mention anything about UMPCs. So I left this out.

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So, my conclusion after a couple of 20-second queries is this: I’ll stick with Google and Live with Yahoo in third place. Powerset? Well, maybe if I just want to search Wikipedia.

Was this a fair test? No. I really need to do more tests. However, it is in a domain I know something about and I’d expect any search engine to handle well. It’s not that obtuse a topic. Now, maybe I’m using the Powerset search engine “wrong” and another form of queries would do well. I’ll be watching out for the experiences of other bloggers.

An aside: Michael Arrington gives kudos to Powerset for returning good results for the query “when did earthquakes hit tokyo” and suggests that people try Google to see how good Powerset is. Well, he’s right. The results from Powerset return the first hit with “The special wards of Tokyo are as follows: ….Tokyo was hit by powerful earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855, and 1923.” A very good match for earthquakes in the last few hundred years. The results from Goole aren’t that spectacular. However, if you search for “wikipedia when did earthquakes hit tokyo,” you’ll be surprised. The third hit to “Dogpile” has the phrase…”Tokyo was hit by powerful earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855 and 1923. The 1923 earthquake , with an estimated.” This is the exact same phrase Powerset returned.

Yes, Google could tweak their results to take into account language more. You can see that in how Live and Yahoo appeared to have good results with my earlier queries. But is this a tweak to Google or a $100M business?

Update: Danny Sullivan does a much better job of explaining the potential value of Powerset. I don’t agree with him about the value of the semantic summaries (their value applies when you already know the meaning behind the sparse words) and in terms of the outline I think he’s right, it looks like there’s potential there. However, this means that the content will have to be contained within Powerset. That may work under Wikipedia’s license, but not other content. So I’m confused how far this is going to go. Now if Powerset wants to leave it at being a better host for Wikipedia content, that’s one thing. But a general search engine? That’s another.

Here are a couple multi-touch physics demos that you may want to check out if multi-touch tables are your thing:

http://rxsurface.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-multitouch-crayon-physics.html

and

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rxsurface/2351234376/

What’s interesting to see is how Google is enabling these Surface-like, multi-touch efforts through it’s student summer programming programs. There’s a whole TouchLib that Google is hosting here which was built in part during this past summer. If you want to experiment with the binaries you can download them here and build your own multi-touch panel using the video below as a guide and Seth Sandlers’ description on his blog.

There’s a whole community growing out of these efforts. Keep your eyes on YouTube if you have any doubts.

I downloaded the binaries, but haven’t been successful yet in getting them working. I imagine I have a configuration issue somewhere along the line. Maybe I’ll have some time this weekend to figure out what it is. Their implementation is classic open source, so you’ll see a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a half dozen libraries required, and sparse documentation to boot. This isn’t holding back eager people from following their recipes though. Great to see such excitement.

Beginning around the early 2000s I was a strong advocate for applying the Google test when hiring people to join a startup. Simply put, the Google test was nothing more than a Google search to see what you could discover about a person online. The more you could find, the better–assuming it was information you wanted to hear. On the other hand, if you couldn’t find one drop of information, then I argued this person probably wasn’t someone you wanted onboard. Today, lots of HR departments routinely check Google about prospective hires. It’s common sense now. It wasn’t back then.

I’m beginning to wonder if the “hire test” now includes a check of Twitter. In other words, if you’re trying to decide whether to bring someone onboard in a startup, should you look to Twitter? I’m leaning towards yes, however, I doubt that the test will be quite as useful as the Google test this time around.

The difference is that there’s a lot of noise on Twitter. Much of what’s battered about on Twitter doesn’t say much. In what ways, however, might Twitter be useful for getting a glance at someone’s online prowess?

1) Read through their tweets to see what they talk about. Is it all about drinking and partying or playing golf or some other leisure activity? Or is there talk about industry trends and news. The latter is more compelling. What’s the demeanor? Is it matter of fact? Confrontational?

2) How many followers/following are there? What’s the ratio? In terms of total numbers, a few hundred followers or following is not too bad. Numbers into the thousands or tens of thousands become more interesting. If the following number is huge, and the ratio fo followers to following is very small, then the person is probably reaching out to many and not getting a lot of return signal. It’s worthwhile re-checking their tweets. Are they essentially spamming people? That’s not good. Generally, a high number of followers is good. There must be some interest in what they are saying (though as spam followers continue to grow this guesstimate will begin to fail.) In the ideal–at least to me–you’d like to see a ratio of followers/following that’s close to one. So if the person has a lot of followers and if following a lot, then you might assume that they are influential and possibly good at reaching out–both which are great traits to have in a startup when you’re trying to spread the word. A ratio close to one and numbers at least in the hundreds, is where things begin to get interesting, but also may indicate that they may have trouble breaking out of a network that they belong to. It’s a tough call.

3) How often does the person tweet? Once, ever? Once a day or so? Dozens of times a day? I’m not sure what the frequency of tweeting says, other than the person’s acceptance of the Twitter concept. A more important measure, might be how often other people respond to what the person says or asks.

4) How long have they been using Twitter? If they started within a few months of Twitter’s debut it may suggest they are quite the early adopter.

5) How often is their Twitter name mentioned by others in replies or in general? A lot of mentions is probably an indication that they are active in the Twitter community.

I’m sure there are some other Twitter indicators. Maybe you have a couple.

I’m still a strong believer in checking Google first, but coming up a fast second is Twitter–at least in the startup world.

Microsoft’s Live Search News or is that Search News Live or Live News Search or ….ugh….anyway….the search that searches news on the MSN domain, yeah that one, has added RSS feeds to its latest incarnation of its news search results. For example, here’s the feed for “Tablet PC:” http://search.msn.com/news/results.aspx?q=tablet+pc&form=QBNB&format=rss.

For those of you like me who sometimes type in URLs for no good reason, the RSS feed for a search term can be widdled down to this:

http://search.msn.com/news/?q=SEARCHTERM&format=rss

For instance, to search for Tablet PC, you can use the much shorter:

http://search.msn.com/news/?q=tablet+pc&format=rss

I’m not sure what form=QBNB means. With my 40+ year old eyes I don’t see what the difference is with and without it. I’m guessing it controls the layout of the query results somehow and QBNB is the default. Yeah, that’s a total guess on my part.

By the way, I don’t see yet how to bring up the RSS directly from the Live Search text box. I tried this for “Tablet PC”:

http://www.live.com/?&scope=news&q=tablet+pc&format=rss

but it doesn’t return the RSS. Hmm. It does return the search results, however, (ignoring the format part of the URL) and on this results page you can select RSS feed.

I’m so glad the Live team has added this feature. It’s time to update thredr.

Now if only the Live Search team would fix up the RSS feeds for the mainstream search so it can return just the “info strip” at the top of some searches. For instance, if I search for “1+2″, on the live site, the search results returns the mathematical answer “3″ at the top of the results:

Yes, call me silly, but being able to query the Live engine for more than just “search results” is quite powerful. It’s a tiny step into controlling the context. You see there’s so much more that “search” engines can be doing and to return the results formatted as RSS is a great communication pathway for applications to hook into the results and leverage them.

For instance, check out this math tip (Silverlight required) at http://www.TabletPCPost.com/math:

See how I can handwrite a math problem into the input area and then send the query to Google? Google is “smart” enough to realize that this is probably a math problem, so it returns the math results cleanly. Live Search doesn’t. We could debate whether this or that implementation is correct, however, what I’d really like to see, neither service implements. What I want is to be able to tell the engine what the context is that I’m looking for. In this case I want a math answer. I’d also like the results in RSS format if I request it so I can programmatically use the results. So, for Live Search, I’d like something like:

http://search.msn.com/?q=1+%2B+2&form=MATH&format=rss

Now, yes, I can get the RSS feed from Live Search for 1 + 2, but notice if I do, it does not return the math results. I can appreciate why. In terms of the context of searching, the math results may not be what you want. But what happens if they are? Imagine a program trying to get to very specific results like my math Tip does. If the search engine was implemented correctly, it could return just the results desired–via RSS. Now this would be extremely powerful.

You could have RSS results (ready for eager programmers to devour) for math, definitions, encyclopedia lookups, and on and on. If you free yourself from even thinking in terms of text (or the user having to type text even if it is ultimately a text query to the user, such as the math Tip does) then there are even more interesting possibilities. Think about graphs or physics or diagrams. OK, I’m probably losing most everyone at this point, but in your downtime, suspend disbelief a little and dream–dream big. There are some amazing possibilities here–at least in terms of one direction I can see search going.

Yeah, I’ve blogged about all of this before, but the possibility still excites me. Someday….

Michael Arrignton is getting concerned over the twists and turns in the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition. Fred Wilson is getting uneasy too. Both are getting quite a bit of attention on Techmeme. Funny thing is that Michael and Fred are concerned for exactly the opposite reasons.

Fred is concerned about companies after an acquisition. Is their value really preserved or maximized in the acquiring company. If not, maybe it’s time to look elsewhere. Michael is going the opposite direction and churning over whether it’s a wise move to hold out for more money when a company has made a bid to acquire it–particularly if the predicted path to increased value involves splitting up current products or services. What happens if it’s a bad decision?

What do I think? They are both right and wrong; you simply can’t predict the future.

One thing is for sure. If anyone–Yahoo included–follows their advice, there will blog posts that make it to the top of TechMeme that say how unsmart Yahoo is being. And if Yahoo doesn’t follow community advice, likewise there will be top TechMeme posts arguing that Yahoo should take this or that move as they’ve suggested all along.

Any other Tableteers or MID-oriented developers thinking about attending Google I/O on May 28th and 29th. I am. You can’t beat the $300 price tag, that’s for sure. Much more reasonable than many other tech conferences. Maybe we could have a micro-Tablet meetup there.

I see that on my other blog that Google thinks it’s spam. In its search results it marks all links with the warning “This site may harm your computer” and pops up a warning screen before taking you to the site. Obviously this isn’t good for first time visitors that are arriving via Google.

I put in a request for a human to review what’s going on. Clearly the blog is not spam, nor does it contain an bad scripts–but the bot doesn’t know that.

The frustrating part of all of this is that there are spam bots that we’ve been fighting for a long time that scrape the content and post parts of it on various spam blogs and sites–some with malicious intent and Google like us has struggled to control this. I think Google’s code has gone too far this time. That’s the fun of automating something. It’s going to be wrong some percentage of the time.

Google says it’s going to take possibly a few weeks to get around to reviewing the links, until then this is going to be pretty embarrassing and I’m know it’s going to confuse my parents to no end if they try to visit the blog via Google. I’ll have to convince them to use Live Search instead :-). Sorry Google, that’s what happens when you get something wrong like this.

Tom Krazit of CNet adds to the chorus of commentary on how Vista does’t fit well into Intel’s MID world. Ubuntu Linux is one hope, and now possibly Google’s Android is another.

Where do I place my bets? That Microsoft will eventually catch on and release a mobile version of XP. I’m still waiting though. No real good, public signs this is happening.

I don’t know enough about Android if that’ll make it. I’d probably pick it over Ubuntu, but that’s just me cheering on Google. I have no experience one way or another to make a rational decision. I’m just working at the gut level.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been talking more about the idea of handwriting search engine queries–and particularly about leveraging handwriting to ease the process of entering complicated text queries, such as math problems.

You can try out the Silverlight app at www.TabletPCPost.com/search and www.TabletPCPost.com/math for yourself if you haven’t done so yet. It lets you handwrite queries within the browser (using a stylus or a mouse or other pointing device) and then recognizes your handwriting on a remote server and then sends off the recognition results to Google when you’re ready.

Supporting handwriting in a search engine may seem esoteric, but the idea gets really interesting when you look how it could enable a wider variety of queries, such as math or physics or chemistry problems. Here the idea is to facilitate more “query types” that often are seeking more help or particular answers than “search” per se. By supporting these additional query types, the search engine expands its notion of being an authority source. If you want to know about xyz, go here is the idea.

Anyway, so here is a mockup of one way that I could see handwritten queries integrated into Google or Live or whatever search engine. One way is to offer a landing page which is 100% designed for ink. Another is to provide an integrated approach which does not get in the way of the majority of text users.

So let’s say at Google.com or the academic search version that Google provided a small pen icon like this:

Tap on the pen button and the default text field could collapse and an alternate inkable surface appears:

The user then could handwrite their query in the panel with the recognized text being returned from a remote server:

Once the query is properly formulated, the user presses the Search button and gets their search results.

To get back to the default text field they could refresh the page or tap on the text icon.

Handwritten queries make even more sense where it can be tedious and error prone to enter the queries textually. Take math problems, for instance:

And now think about an answer engine that shelves your handwritten “queries” for access later. Makes quite a bit of sense with ink since the queries can become very complicated. And think about other problem types. Imagine a query that returns interactive plots. Formatted and publishable diagrams. And on and on. Can you also imagine how this could be a nice entry point for a partner infrastructure? I can. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Of course, there’s no doubt that integrating in a Silverlight or Flash panel to a heavily used query page is going to increase the page loads for more people than will actually use it. But then again, as more and more answer services are integrated into the search engine this ratio could change. Initially non-integrated handwritten queries probably make the most sense, followed by certain query pages–such as those for students, engineers, or other specific markets.

If you’d like to comment on this idea you can do so on my other blog here.

It’s no surprise, Google is introducing their slide show app today. It looks OK, though it looks as sparse as some of the other Google Docs offerings.

Of all the comments I’ve seen so far, TDavid is my fav so far–in part, because he brings in Robots to his discussion and you know me–I’m partial to the whole Robot thing. Anyway, TDavid is taking the opportunity to nudge at Microsoft to compete in the non-enterprise Office space. (Kind of sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?) I’m sure somewhere someone is. You can’t put tens of thousands of engineers in a bottle and not expect at least one of them to see the light–despite all the short-term consequences of doing so.

Also, Matt Cutts shows how to embed a Google Presenation in a blog post, although it’s not quite what I’d expect. First, you have to sign in–which exposes your email address to everyone else currently signed in to the document. Next it doesn’t scale, physically scale to the window size. You can click on a link though to open a new window to view the “finished” presentation which scales properly though. Isn’t that what should be in the embedded iframe? Maybe it can be. Dunno.

Here’s a video from Google that introduces the new Google Docs presentation system:

Kind of makes you think Google is a friend of ink–if only it was supported more directly in the browser–cross platform. I need to go back to my IE addin and get “ink” (more like paths) working with DHTML surfaces. That’s the best chance for ink in Google Docs.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to work on a Robot that travels to the moon?

There’s no doubt in my mind, something is up with Google’s BlogSearch. There are completely valid blog results that sometimes appear and sometimes don’t depending on whether I go to the BlogSearch results the first time, or click on Sort by relevance, or Sort by date, or change the time range from one hour to lets say 12 hours. In the later case, I fully expect to see recently added blog entries, that were just picked up in the last hour to also appear in the last 12 hours list. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.

Here are some screenshots that show the problem in one small case. Here’s a Search By Relevance query I did for “InkWell and Tablet” for the last hour:

It has one result from winbeta.org.

And now here are the results from doing a Search by Relevance query for the last day:

Interestingly, the winbeta.org link isn’t there. Was it pruned out accidentally or maybe is this Google’s effort to prune out spam posts? Weird.

To make it even more confusing, here are the results for Search by Date for the last day:

(By the way, I cropped out a spam link at the bottom.)

Surprisingly, the winbeta.org link now shows up but the link to Gottabemobile–which is a high quality link–is gone. Hmmm. This shakes my confidence in Google’s BlogSearch.

What about the other search engines?

Technorati does an OK job, but doesn’t get all the links. Nor does BlogLines. Oh, and good old reliable TechMeme has picked up the story and a couple links, although it’s not comprehensive–it’s missing Gottabemobile. Not bad, but since the other search results are so bad, I wish TechMeme was even better. I trust it more and more.

Why can’t someone do a good blog search????

Update: An engineer from Google emailed me to let me know that at the end of the listings there is some text which you can click on to reveal blog entries which are very similar. The filtering is a good idea because there are quite a few “spam” sites that copy/paste news from other blogs. There’s no reason to give them any exposure. This might explain some of what I was–or should I say, was not–seeing. However, I’m not sure if it explains the differences I was encountering when switching between “Seach by Relevance” and “Search by Date.” There was at least one high quality site that got dumped. Maybe it was being removed because of the duplicates. The problem was that it was the site others were copying. I’ll have to pay attention to this more. It may not be a bug that I was encountering, but something by design. Either way it was producing results that didn’t make sense to me. I rely on Google’s BlogSearch quite a bit so I hope this is more of a problem with me and how I use it than a problem with the search engine itself. I’ll be watching more closely.