2 October 2008
Techmeme embraces its killer - Google Blogsearch
Google Blogsearch relaunched today with a new design - and as a clear competitor to news aggregator sites like Techmeme. However, as a news aggregator, Techmeme has no choice but to cover this story big and bold as show in the screenshot above! Ironic.
For full details and comparison, follow the link!
The new site finds the most popular stories being written about in 11 different categories from politics to technology. Blogsearch will group blog posts about the same story into clusters letting you know how many blogs are covering that story and over what time period. Within each cluster, Google will prioritise the most recent and interesting posts about that story.
Digging into a cluster, Google displays a graph showing the number of blogs covering that particular story over time. This looks very similar to Google Trends for websites and search terms but I can’t see much use for it.
The big question about Blogsearch is, can it really be the Techmeme killer (or any other blog aggregator killer) that is being hyped up to be? I suspect it can simply because of the breadth of categories that it is covering. Techmeme covers just tech blogs - Blogsearch covers everything.
However despite the similarities, I suspect Google is trying to publicly keep away from any comparisons with Techmeme but internally would love to become a Techmeme replacement. Matt Cutt’s on his personal blog (note: he doesn’t speak for Google on his personal blog) wrote specifically about this comparison:
It’s great to see this new home page go live, because I’ve watched as the blogsearch team in New York pulled this together. Some people will compare it to Techmeme, but the sites are quite different.
Matt goes into what he thinks those difference are, some of which I have mentioned here. Techmeme sure doesn’t seem worried, having plastered the ‘Techmeme killer’ story across its homepage.
So if you use Techmeme, are you planning on switching to Blogsearch now? I definately will be making regular visits and if it seems better, perhaps I will switch. I think its nice not just to see the same old ‘important’ blogs coming up time and time again. What do you think?
2 Comments currently posted.
ooopinionsss says:
Ed Hardy bags says:
i like this
How you think when the economic crisis will end? I wish to make statistics of independent opinions!