What follows is a bit of a rant but hopefully it might be illuminating to those of you wondering how I track stuff on the Internet
What’s wrong with these pictures:
Google Blog Search is a fantastically useful service. It takes RSS feeds from blogs and similar platforms and allows your to track certain keywords using the Google Alerts system. So if someone mentions you on their blog and you’re tracking your name you’ll get a notification. This isn’t a vanity search – it’s an essential part of what makes the distributed network of weblogs conversational.
It’s also a valuable tool for blogging about a subject. One of my jobs is running the Custard Factory site and every morning I check through my “Tracking” folder to see what blog posts, news article, Flickr photos and YouTube videos have been put online about the Custard Factory. It both speeds up my job and allows me to bring in things that might otherwise have slipped past the traditional radar.
That is until Google tweaked Blog Search.
I can’t find any official announcement but a few days ago a few of us noticed our alerts were suddenly a hell of a lot less useful. Previously Google would just index the content of the RSS feed, in other words the stuff you’re reading here between the title of the post and the title of the next post. Now, for some bizarre reasons known only to themselves they’re indexing the whole page including the sidebar.
And that’s what’s wrong with the above pictures. That post has no mention of the Custard Factory yet it appeared in my “Custard Factory” alert because the phrase appears in the sidebar. The thing is, that phrase appears on every page of the blog meaning that every time I post something it’ll appear in the alert regardless of whether it’s relevant or not.
And it gets worse. Check out this one:
That’s from this post by my old chum Rol but if you search the page you’ll find no mention of Custard Factory at all. That’s because Rol has a widget on his sidebar that has a a snippet of the last post from all the blogs he’s following. When Google indexed the page this post of mine was the most recent thing I’d published. Now it’s not. And even more stupidly it had nothing to do with Rol whatsoever. He probably never even knew the words appeared on his site.
If you think this is stupid and would like Google to make their Blog Search useful again please let them know using this form. I thank you.
The stats you get with a WordPress.com blog have gone all wonky as a result of this, too. They use Google Blog Search and now the ‘incoming links’ bit shows you that there’s a new post on a blog that holds a sidebar link to you, rather than a new link.