Yesterday a news story hit, an editor was near my station, and overhearing the discussion I went to Memeorandum to find out if it was breaking among bloggers – and it was. Memeorandum has quickly become a must visit site for me, multiple times a day.

Now for some thoughts on Google Blog Search….

Lets get something clear right away – it isn’t blog search – it’s RSS/Atom search. Google is indexing RSS and Atom outputs to build this search engine. Our RSS and Atom and only that. It places heavy emphasis on titles and seems to ignore tagging and categories assigned to posts. There does not seem to be a PageRank-style algorithm at play here. It is fast, and it gets updated far more frequently that Google’s main search index by taking advantage of the fact that most blog toolsets automatically ping third party services when posts are made. For more see Google’s FAQ.

Some are arguing that how this works will actually diminish blogger influence. Some think that it foretells removal of bloggers from its main search index (Joël Céré). Others believe that Google didn’t go far enough and should include results from this new engine in its main search output (Dave Winer). Some are saying this is marks the end of tagging (Jeff Harrell).

A few things are clear however:

It is not fully baked yet, many features bloggers demand are missing.

Full-text feeds have an advantage (rc3.org) over partial summary feeds, since only content in feeds are indexed.

And lastly blogs have a new source of traffic and for those who care – a new source of recognition that they matter. For far too many I personally know – if it is not on Google – it doesn’t count. That probably makes a lot of you uncomfortable. Believe me, I understand.