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Googles Blog Search Next Iteration Of A Good Idea

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by Kevin Maney
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Oct 02 2008 11:08am EDT

Google's Blog Search: Next Iteration of a Good Idea

Kevin Maney writes: Only a couple of years ago, Alan Warms let me in on what he was developing at his new company, BuzzTracker. Techmeme was already out there -- a site that culled the Web for blog posts about technology, and aggregated them on a page based on what topics were getting the most blogging attention.


In the tried and true tradition of technology, BuzzTracker grabbed the idea and went a step further. It created software that could be easily modified to focus its blog-scraping on any topic. BuzzTracker tracked and ranked typical topics like "politics" and "technology," but also could quickly add a hot topic -- like "Sarah Palin" or "Hurricane Ivan." It was such a good idea that Yahoo last year bought BuzzTracker for about $5 million. But, strangely, BuzzTracker is not Yahoo Buzz. Both rank stories, but based on entirely different criteria. A little confusing.

Anyway, not to be outdone, Google just announced a remake of its Blog Search function. It seems to do pretty much the same thing as BuzzTracker, but without (so far) the flexibility to organize by instantly-created topics. Google's Blog Search does, however, look cleaner and more easily accessible than BuzzTracker or Techmeme or any of the other versions of this that are out there.

The funny thing is that today, the launch of Google Blog Search is the top story on both Techmeme and BuzzTracker's technology category.

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