News from Google
Did you know that millions of bloggers around the world write new posts each week? If you're like me, you probably read only a tiny fraction of these in Google Reader. What's everybody else writing about? Our Blog Search team thought this was an interesting enough question to look into. What we found was a massive mix: entertaining items about celebrities, personal perspectives on political figures, cutting-edge (and sometimes unverified) news stories, and a range of niche topics often ignored by the mainstream media.Today, we're pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.
In this example, the green "64 blogs" link takes you inside the cluster and shows you all the blog posts for a story.
We've had a great time building the new homepage and we hope you enjoy using it. Please give it a try and let us know if you have comments or suggestions. We're launching in English only today, but plan to add new features and support for more languages in the coming months, so stay tuned.
Michael Cohen, Product Manager
googleblog.blogspot.com
published @ October 2, 2008
