Google and Blogs

I’ve been thinking about this notion that google might start segregating blog search results. I have questions about how they would be able to tell a blog from “regular” content. Also, while granting the ephemeral nature of many blog entries, (though in aggregate such posts can still reveal interesting data, such as “hot topics”, popular trends, etc), there are other types of postings such as recipes or travel reports, that are intended as permanent reference material. (As it turns out, most of the traffic to my site is from folks looking for my peanut butter cookie recipe! That’s the topic of another post.)

I don’t want my primary recipe pages to get lost over in the (proposed) blog index. So, what to do? One simple thing would be for google to learn a bit about blog structures, and use that knowledge when creating the entry for a search result. Google should link to, and cache, the permalink, not the frontpage of the site, where, on a blog, the content today is probably not the content that was indexed yesterday or a week ago. That doesn’t solve the segration problem, but does make google’s results a bit more meaningful, lessening pressure to isolate blogs in their own search space.

Phil Ringnalda elaborates on this theme quite a bit more; well worth the read:

phil ringnalda dot com: What Google could do with weblogs