Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
I'm so late posting about Google's blog search that I've been overtaken by the launch of Yahoo's version. For some strange reason, Yahoo have put the blog search in a separate box on a sidebar on their news search screen - I missed it the first time I looked at the site.

On first impression, I'm not terribly impressed with Yahoo's offering. I tried it out with the names of a few prominent Kiwi bloggers - it turned up practically zilch. In one case, the only link was to a blog by another author on the same site as the person I was searching for. Google's is somewhat better - it returned blogs by the people I was searching for, and blog posts that mentioned them.

Even so, using Google over the last few days has been frustrating - I've been running a regular search for work, where I need to retrieve everything published on a given topic, and Google is missing posts that I know are out there. In spite of that, it's doing a pretty good job, as is Google News. I do find myself having to double-check media websites, though - Google News misssed an important article that was buried low-down on stuff.co.nz. And both services are still in Beta, so I shouldn't be overly critical - but Technorati is proving more useful at the moment.

What others are saying:

John Battelle;
Techdirt ("None of them are particularly comprehensive, and all of them have problems").

| posted by Simon at 8:33 pm