TechJournal

There are millions of blogs around the web covering virtually every topic known to man.  This is where blog search engines like Technorati thrive.  For different niches of blogs there are also other successful trackers or memetrackers, that analyze blog posts to determine what web pages are being discussed or cited most often on the web.   Examples of these memetrackers for technology blogs are Techmeme and Slashdot.   Of course there are also memetrackers for virtually every topic, most of them are socially driven where users vote on articles and bump them up to the front page like Digg and Reddit.

Google also has its own blog search but since they were too busy on their mainstream search, they have not taken advantage of the memetracking model, until now.  Google Blog Search  has redesigned their home page and it uncannily looks like Techmeme.

"Today, we're pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere." [Official Google Blog]

This spells bad news for memetrackers like Techmeme and Slashdot that are mostly supported by donations.  Moreover, with Google Blog Search designed as a memetracker, that kind of competition takes in most of the new people trying to find a decent search engine for the blogosphere.

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