Search of the future
I was just reading through the FAQ for Google’s Blogsearch and this caught my eye:
Blog Search indexes blogs by their site feeds, which will be checked frequently for new content. This means that Blog Search results for a given blog will update with new content much faster than standard web searches. Also, because of the structured data within site feeds, it is possible to find precise posts and date ranges with much greater accuracy.
On the outset, it looks simple, logical and a no-brainer explanation, but look closer:
..because of the structured data within site feeds, it is possible to find precise posts and date ranges with much greater accuracy.
Aha! So, what do we have here? From a chaotic and random content all over the web, there lies a pattern (framed by feeds) that will align and make sense in a machine language thus making data mining much more accurate and indexable. Imagine Googlebot picking up your structured data and forming a matrix (site name, authors, posts, dates, importance, pageranks, categories, email addresses, tags, who knows what else..), you get the zoomed-out picture now.
Welcome to the search of the future. By 2010 if not earlier, when most sites will be powered by some content management system that would emit a structured feed irrespective of the software that generates them, we will have a perfect matrix for data extraction.
I believe Google is already doing this for blogs. That’s probably the reason blogs are ranked better, and not because they are voices or conversations. Blogs (with feed content) provide a perfect structure for the most accurate data extraction and indexing possible from the existing feed framework.
So I see Blogsearch as Google’s pilot to the future of search itself.
I praise your analysis.
Sep 17, 05 at 04:36Roy: The phrase “structured data” got me thinking :).
Sep 18, 05 at 07:14