When I was a kid if you wanted a glass of milk, I went to get it from the “Fridgidaire.” Didn’t matter if our refrigerator was actually manufactured by Westinghouse, General Electric, or Sears…it was the Fridgidaire. Somehow that brand name had become synonymous with “refrigerator.” In the same way, the present generation doesn’t “search” for something on the Internet, it “Googles,” a corporate name that has become a verb.

And now you can google blogs. Of course, blogs have always shown up in regular Google searches, but Google Inc. has just rolled out Google Blogsearch (blogsearch.google.com), a search engine specificly devoted to the blogosphere. Now technorati has been doing that for some time, but Google’s brand-familiarity with the general public will probably catapult this new engine to instant stardom.

So why search on blogsearch.google.com or technorati, rather than just plain old Google? First of all, the blog engines, of course, confine themselves to blogs, so you don’t have to sift through piles of links to more static web pages. Also, it appears that the Google blog engine takes note of the “feeds” that blogs generate (code that alerts user programs called feed agregators that there is a new post on a blog) to insure that the top links are the freshest blog material available on the topic.

I did a test to see how Sacred Journey fares in this new brawl for elbow space at the virtual bar. Using “poythress” as my keyword (because I’ve written numerous posts here about Westminster professor Vern Poythress), SJ doesn’t come up on regular Google until page four. However, I come in (at the moment I’m posting this) on Google blogsearch as the sixth, seventh, and eighth links and on technorati as the fourth.

It will be interesting to watch whether this new tool brings blogs even more into the mainstream. One commentator said that right now feels for blogs like 1995 did for the Web in general, when it first really exploded into the general public consciousness.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2005 at 6:11 am and is filed under Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.