Google Blog Search Feeling Underfed
When I heard about Google Blog Search, my first thought was to wonder how they would find all the blogs to include.
Sure enough, we are not included.
Looking at their About page, there is a FAQ, and items 5 and 6 address the matter. You have to ping an updating service, which we do, though weblogs.com has been wonky about accepting pings lately, and now blogrolling.com has joined them in that fine endeavor.
You also have to have a working site feed.
Oops.
In Firefox (you are using Firefox, right?), near the lower left there is an orange and white icon if a site has a working feed. For instance, PoliBlog has it. That lets you add a “live bookmark.”
Note the lack of one if you’re on our site.
Oops.
Yeah, so, we’ve been totally ignoring that failure on the part of our blogging software, since we don’t really have much of an understanding of or appreciation for the whole “feeds” thing.
We also have been meaning to update our Expression Engine to a newer release Real Soon Now. So my hope is that said update will make the feeds EE so prominently “includes” (note the links near the top of our right column) as a feature work.
If not? Help me Obi-Readers… you’re my only hope.
Anyone know how to make this fecal cuss work?
Hi Jay and Deb—I use Moveable Type and I have some automatic pings set up within my weblog config area. It is supposed to ping blo.gs weblogs.com and technorati but I’ve found they don’t often work. Then I just started going to http://www.pingomatic.com and manually ping the top feed sites and that has helped. But alas, that doesn’t always work either, the site must be on slow servers because it often chokes and the pings aren’t successful.
I also set up some automatic pings to the smaller sites like feedster, icerocket, etc. I followed all the tips this article suggested: http://nextlevelpartner.typepad.com/bbab/2005/03/16_ways_to_driv.html—I only did the free ones. It’s an informative article esp. if you follow all the links in it.
I’m not sure which thing or combination of things I did, but I checked blogsearch.google.com today, type in my URL and my last do 68 posts do appear. So something worked. Just not sure what..LOL!! Good luck.
Posted by Lori on 09/15 at 07:07 PMYou most certainly do have a working site feed. In fact, you have three of them, one of which I subscribe to. (In the upper right-hand corner of your page, it says “Syndicate—RSS 1.0; RSS 2.0; Atom.” These are your feeds.) Except for coming here to post this comment, I never visit your site on the Net. But I do read it in a desktop RSS reader (Feed Demon).
Now I did notice, as you did, that your site does not produce a “live bookmark” icon in Firefox, nor does it trigger Feed Demon’s “auto-discovery” feature; I suspect the two are related.
Somehow your feeds are not apprising the browser—or the Google bot—of their presence; alas, I don’t know why. But somebody out here knows why, and I hope they tell you how to fix it.
As for understanding this “feed thing,” I’m an example of its value. I don’t visit your site. But I read your blog. In the age of syndication, visitors and readers are not necessarily the same people. The latter group may be—indeed, almost certainly is—larger than the former.
Because I track such things through Feed Burner, I know that some two dozen people subscribe to my blog’s feed. They’re not visiting my page, but they’re reading my work. And isn’t that what matters? Moreover, subscribers to a blog are not unlike subscribers to a newspaper, as opposed to those who randomly pick up a copy at the corner newsstand: they’re the most loyal consumers of the product. After all, they subscribe! They have the product delivered to them.
You have working feeds. You need easily accessible feeds. See if these folk can help.
Posted by Paul on 09/15 at 07:11 PMyup, what he said. you don’t have the live bookmark thingie in Firefox, but I set it up with (I think.. it’s been there a while) the Atom feed, so you DO, in fact have a working feed. The question becomes, how does Firefox handle EE-default feeds (I’m assuming if you don’t know you’ve got one, you didn’t tinker with the defaults). I don’t know because I don’t use it. I also think your site is the only EE blog I read… I’d have to check. Where there’s a feed, I usually have a live bookmark and for some extremely special ones (like this one), I tinker until I have the live bookmark running. I don’t like those desktop aggregators Paul is talking about…
Posted by Jim S on 09/16 at 12:05 AM