Google Blog Search

Blogs on Google Blog are categorized according to a list of categories, including Politics, U.S., World, Business, Technology, Video Games, Science, Entertainment, Movies, Television, and Sports.

Some examples of the blogs indexed on Google are Power Line, TPM Election Central, RedState, Hot Air TV, Bad Astronomy, CNN Political Ticker, Scared Monkeys, Gizmodo Comments, Library Grants, and Balloon Juice.

Generally, the philosophy of the First Amendment in the U.S. is that the public benefits from a vigorous debate. The sheer numbers and the range of the opinions presented on the web and on blogs listed on Google Blogs would seem to promote the policy of Freedom of Expression.

Google Blogs also lists hot queries and Top Stories. Blog authors can enter their blog address and add the blog to Google Blogs (Blogs can be created using Google-owned Blogger).

A Date function adds the capability of limiting a search on Google Blogs to a certain date range. Blog searches in dozens of languages can be executed in Google Blog Search.

SafeSearch is available on Google Blogs so that young people can avoid adult material.

The term "Blog" is a bit like the term "Spam": Both come from the era of the World Wide Web, both have nebulous meanings, and usage of both terms seems to be expanding. On the Google Blogs site, the term blog is used to include film review sites and political commentary sites.

Google Blogs offers a "Google Blog Search Pinging Service", which is a long title for a way of informing Google Blogs of blog updates. The updates are automatically included in the Google Blogs index and shared with other index services. Alternatively, a blogger can manually ping Google Blog every time the blog is updated. This is the equivalent of registering a URL with a search engine.

Simply because a blogger pings Google Blogs with an update doesn't mean it will be included in the index. Google Blog Search pinging service is the equivalent of Google Sitemaps. Both allow the author to inform Google of updates. The former is used by webmasters; the latter is used by bloggers.

The Google nomenclature itself is worth a chuckle (for example, according to Google, the user can "ping us programmatically through use of the Google Blog Search Pinging Service API").

Here are some other articles that may be helpful:

Google Development and Google API Topics

Google's YouTube

Google still Developing Google Translate