Google Blog Search is now Techmeme for the masses
Memetrackers are not a new phenomenon, indeed the unopposed market leader, Techmeme, was launched in 2005, and now boasts an impressive number of sources (Blorge included). But thanks to a huge redesign, Google Blog Search has now entered the fray and promises to be Techmeme for the masses.
What memetrackers do is identify emerging stories on the Web, who is covering them, and how much coverage each topic or trend is receiving. This method means that they often beat social media sites such as Digg and Netscape by days.
Google Blog Search has now joined the growing collection of memetrackers on the Internet. A redesign and relaunch has seen the site become much more than just a Google search engine specially for blogs. It now resembles Google News but using blogs rather than news sites as its source material.
The homepage is separated in to 11 different categories including World, Entertainment, Sports, and Politics as well as the all-encompassing Top Stories. Within each category there are a number of breaking stories listed, with the most credible source, or blog which broke the news sitting at the top.
The memetracker part comes in to play because next to each story is a section keeping track of how many blogs are covering that particular story. Click on that figure and you get each entry related to that news item listed in no particular order. A nice addition is a graph to the side showing how coverage of that story has dipped and peaked over an allotted time period.
There are a couple of problems inherent in the current collection of memetrackers that Google Blog Search could have overcome.
The first, which is inherent to Techmeme, is that only so many sources are used, with the same sites cropping up time and time again. Google Blog Search shouldn’t have this problem as it indexes thousands of blogs all across the Web, with little regard for who may be respected or seen as credible.
The second problem is that which sees memetrackers gamed by certain sites to drive traffic. This is more common on sites such as Digg, Mixx, and Reddit, but memetrackers aren’t immune either.
The new Google Blog Search has only just launched and is sure to see improvements over the coming months. It’s not the Techmeme killer that some have suggested, but with its wider range of topics and higher number of sources, it certainly could quickly become Techmeme for the masses.
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