Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Google Blog Search Doesn’t Find Many Links

When you use the “link” operator in Google Blog Search, you were once able to get a good overview of which backlinks were posted to a given post. This was even useful as a kind of lazy trackback feature, because Google Blog Search allows you to grab an RSS feed of search results, which you could in turn plug-in on any blog page of yours using the Google AJAX Feed API. Not anymore – at least not when I test with this blog. A search for ...

link:http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-10-29-n47.html

... for instance returns 4 backlinks in Google Blog Search. In Technorati, the same result obtains 174 hits. Admittedly, some of these may be spam that Google decides to filter, but that seems to be a much more relevant result than the one Google ends up displaying.

Am I doing something wrong, does anyone know more about this? Has Google Blog Search started to hide a portion of backlinks, similar to Google web search (perhaps to disable tools utilizing that info), or is it just broken?

On another note, I’m now also running into trouble with Google’s AJAX Search widget... as it contains much, much less far, far fewer pages than I can find with a normal Google web search. As an example, searching for ["A Blogger’s Code"] on this site only returns an archive overview page, but not the post itself. The same search on Google.com yields the right page (as long as the parameter isn’t “safe=on”, strangely enough). And I only switched to this Google AJAX search widget in the first place because the Google SOAP API was broken some of the time...

Google Blog Search Doesn’ ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (9)

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