Blog Search and Link Tracking (continued)

So roughly one week after I started my search for a Technorati replacement and just as I was settling into a nice relationship with IceRocket, the 800 pound gorilla (ie Google) finally showed up as we knew they would eventually.

Yes, Google launched blog search and link tracking today. 

Interestingly, they did it under the Blogger brand, not the Google brand.

After playing with it for all of 10 minutes, and doing blog searches on things like Social Bookmarking, Treo 650, Bloc Party, Portastatic, Behavioral Targeting, and more, I have to say Google has done a nice job.

I did not see the spam blogs that Jeff Jarvis noticed, but maybe I didn’t click on enough links to see them.

I don’t entirely understand the brown links at the top called "Top Blogs".  I’ll have to figure out what that is.

The one thing I don’t like is the redirect on every link.  I prefer going direct to the blog like IceRocket does it.  The redirect slows down the experience noticeably.

The link tracking seems very good as well.  They don’t use the "sort by date" results page that IceRocket uses which I really like for link tracking.  The "sort by date" results page really helps me notice what’s new versus what I’ve seen before.

But they do seem to be capturing more blog links more quickly than either Feedster or IceRocket.  IceRocket also seems very slow this morning.  Maybe a lot of people are doing what I was doing, running parallel searches on both.

I noticed that you can’t search for links farther back than March 1st, 2005 with Google.  I guess that is how far back Google’s blog search index goes.  That is interesting in its own right.

Feedster goes a long way back and they have captured 3,062 links to my blog going back to January 11, 2004.

IceRocket and Google both seemed to start crawling my blog around the same time.  Google started March 1st of this year and IceRocket apparently started on April 14th of this year.  Google has amassed 946 links in the 6 and 1/2 months they’ve been crawling it.  IceRocket has amassed 894 links in the 6 months they’ve been crawling it.  Both average out to 4.9 links per day so that tells me that Google and IceRocket are picking up basically the same links.

So, I am going to put Google on my link tracking list on the left sidebar and start using it along with IceRocket and Feedster.

And I am going to start using Google blog search to look for stuff on blogs more often.  I am not sure its the best, but its certainly good enough for most people.

After all, they are the Starbucks of the Internet.