Google's new blog search service, (apparently now to be called Bloogle for evermore) is pushing bloggers to clarify their thinking, make decisions and articulate thoughts on the blogosphere that go beyond simple searching. There's a welcome glut of good stuff out there today. Examples:

Zoli's blog: "Unless your blog is all about ad-revenue generation, in which case you need to attract readers to your site, there is no reason to not serve up the entire post in your feed. It’s really simple: in this world of infoglut either you make reading your blog convenient, or expect to lose subscribers who are fed up with clicking and waiting. Submitting a ‘bait’ in your feed defeats the purpose of RSS Readers."

Bloogle reads feeds to build your search results, so do you lose out with a snipped feed?

Micropersuasion: Testblogging without a full feed (and with a mighty creative unique keyword) to see which engines see the post & whether the snipped feed is a problem for bloogle.

A Welsh View: Finds a few splogs, but appreciates the simplicity. (Are you listening, Blogpulse?)

The RSS Blog: Randy compares technorati & google search for responsiveness, timeliness & coverage, & decides that the new service "kicks ass!" Seems like a reasonable conclusion. Think about how cool it'll be when they iron out the beta & dress it up in a fancy new suit in 6 weeks....

Scripting News: Links to a blogger who caught the google crawler in the act, questions the page-ranking / relevance results of the new service, wonders how good the engine is at finding posts without titles.... (How good is a reader at finding posts without titles...)

Dave Sifry (cross posted on Technorati) welcomes the competition while pointing up all the things that Technorati can do that the new Google Search can't. Of course, this now becomes a "to-do-list" for the bloogle dev. team, & is probably pinned on the inside of someone's cubby right now. "Check, check, check..."

Jason Calacanis sees the big picture, & blogs on the potential increase in traffic that will come when this gets out of beta:

When Google puts blog search on the home page traffic to blogs—all blogs—will double or triple. In the case of smaller blogs it might grow 100x. We’re half way there folks… all we need now is for Google to put it on the homepage and blogs will take their seat at the big table: right between the web search and news search. Normal folks will be on the same level as MSM. That is what this about when it comes down to it: equality.

This last struck me the most. We've all posted about our blog-world comparisons between this & that, & whether to have full feeds or partial feeds. These are all valid questions, but the idea that this service might herald a broader horizon for blogs suggests new & expansive possibilities....

Filed In: google, blogger, search, blogsearch, blogging, blogtech, inbounds