Thursday, November 23, 2006

Google Blogs Onebox

Andy Boyd discovered a Google Blog search onebox below Google results in a search for “tea”. I can’t reproduce this, so it might be one of Google’s prototypes in which they start collecting usage data before deciding whether or not to roll this out.

Now, considering that blog results often appear in normal web searches anyway, one of the major uses of this onebox could be to show new information only, as Andy’s screenshot indicates, too (blog posts linked from it are from 4-12 hours old). In that case, this onebox would somewhat compete for attention with the existing Google News onebox.
Also, I wonder how Google wants to decide on quality for these blog links – surely they can’t allow any recently updated spam blog to inhibit this spot, but for very fresh posts it might also be hard to rank this in terms of backlinks... unless they manage to count blog-post backlinks in near real-time.

On a related note, here’s a couple of other oneboxes we still need and the search predictions for 2006.

You can digg Andy’s post if you like it.

[Via Ionut. Image by Andy Boyd.]

Google Blogs Onebox by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (9)

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