Can Daypop stay out of Google's Headlights?
There's an article by Mark Glaser on OJR about Daypop in relation to all the talk about Google offering weblog search.
In addition to some background on Daypop, I got characterized as "a deer caught in the headlights" of Google. What the article failed to mention was my rationale for thinking Google might bring more awareness to weblogs: the Google News roll out has had no net effect on Daypop's search traffic. I think this is because 1) many people who search for news are news junkies and will scour all the sites possible and 2) the people who stopped using Daypop in favor of Google News were made up for by new people learning about the possibility of searching for news.
Which is not to say I ever even thought it was Google's style to offer a blog tab on their front page. The article by Orlowski at the Register, "Google to fix blog noise problem," was obviously total conjecture. Unfortunately, a lot of people took it as "reporting". Google's Blog Search even made Slashdot where discussion debated the merits of removing blogs from the main index and adding a blog tab!
Sidenote: I searched Daypop for "google blog" to try and find The Register's article. "Google to fix blog noise problem" is NOT the #1 result on Daypop for that search. I remember complaints from The Register not too long ago that their relevant pages were buried in Google search results. It would help to title their pages with something more descriptive than just "The Register". You could title it with say, the title of the article! This serves two purposes: 1) it offers more information to someone searching for your article and more importantly, because it goes to the heart of The Register's complaint, 2) the article would be judged more relevant for a search on "google blog" and would probably end up the #1 search result.
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I assumed Orlowski's article was satire. He started it with a grain of fact and turned it into a sandpit in which to throw blogging.
CollegeSucks.org
I just find it funny that people consider blogs to be noise on search engines. I find it more annoying to find those fucking porno pages with HTML pages that just have the keywords that you are looking for. Those are the real problems when searching the net. I have found so many of the things that I am looking for, plus more, when I stumble across a blog that has the words that I am looking for. So what's next, only allow "professional" sites on the main index of search engines?
