Google


Ping’m

My first reaction to finding out about Google’s new pinging service was, well, COOL.

Today we’re launching the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, which is a way for individual bloggers and blog platform providers to inform us of content changes.

Yep, I was thinking that they would acknowledge the changes quickly and the content would show up in Google’s search indexs as fast as stuff shows up on Technorati after you ping them. It looks like that may not be the case. From the Google Blog Search FAQ:

5. I pinged the Google Blog Search, but why don’t I see the results in Google Blog Search?
While the Google Blog Search Pinging Service helps us stay informed about updates to your blog, it doesn’t guarantee that your blog will be included in our Blog Search results. Since our inclusion process is automated, many factors, such as delays between when we receive the ping and when we then crawl your blog, can affect your blog’s inclusion.

I’m going to give this a try and hopefully the results are a bit better than their apparently broken change log.
You can ping them manually or if your blogging platform supports it you do it automatically.

Via Bloggers Blog.


Finding Old News

How many times have you tried to research a post and not been able to find that 6 month old article that you kind of remember….? It has happened to me more than once!
Now, google, has taken a big step toward solving that and related research problems with the introduction of Google News Archive Search. Yep, you are no longer stoppered by Google’s old 30 day limit.
I ran several tests and a search for (clinton opium) brought up a result from the Clinton, Iowa Mirror dated March 14, 1896. This result came from newspaperarchive.com, a pay service, so Google must have some kind of arrangement with them.

Via John Battele.