On Google buying Blogger

Dan Gillmor: Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time

CNET's News.com: Google buys blog tool developer

Google has bought Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger, which has 1.1 million registered users (200,000 active). There has been no news from Google on why or what they may do with it.

Weblogs present a problem for Google's Web search. Say I write about snowboarding in my blog one day, and my next update a week later is about India. Googlebot indexes my page soon thereafter. Someone uses Google to search for snowboading in India and my page shows up. But my page had nothing on it about snowboarding in India of course, so the searcher is disappointed to not find the information they are looking for.

The page is usually the basic unit of content on the Web, but with a Weblog this is not the case. The update is the basic unit.

So how can Google improve their search results for Weblogs? By buying Blogger, Google can have a set format for what one blog update is in a large number of blogs. Other blog software makers may agree to start using this format. I would suggest that <div class="update"> </div> encompass an update. Or it could be class="update" on any [X]HTML element. update is too general a class name though. So blogUpdate may be better. Or there could be a META you could add in the HEAD of you blog to trigger Googlebot treating that page as a weblog.

Why doesn't Advagato support <code> </code>?