Lazycoder

Google blog search suuucccckkks right now

Have you tried out the new Google blog search? Either it really sucks or I just don’t get it. It’s probably the latter.

So at first glance, it appears to be a blog discovery engine. Type in a topic and Google sifts through all of it’s search results for the sites that look like weblogs. Then it searches for your keyword, does it’s relevance shuffle, and presents the results to you. The “About blog search” confirms that.

So I type in “ASP.NET Programming” (yeah I know it strips out punctuation, but that’s how a real person is going to search). Most of the results include talk about “PDC Day 1″?! Well, that’s not quite what I asked about. Now it’s not meeting my expectations, I would *think* that weblogs.asp.net might come up or at least blogs.microsoft.com, but they are no where to be found on the first page. The first result is this page. http://blogs.qacommunity.com/DaveWheeler/. Note that he isn’t even an ASP.NET developer.

So I try another search, “Windows Programming”. Now I’m not looking for any specific blogs here, I just want to see what comes up. Why the first result is Dave Wheeler….again. man he gets around. Maybe I should read his blog since Google considers him the most relevant result to both “ASP.NET Programming” and “Windows Programming”. Subscribed! The third result links to a blog which posted about an XML Paper specification. ?! Weird, ok moving on. Starting at about the fifth result, the remainder of the resuults (with the exception of one result talking about “windows programming interview questions”) all have to do with the third edition Java Language specification. Hmmmm, didn’t expect that. But I guess my “Windows programming” search was a little generic. I suppose I should be glad that I didn’t get back the Rolox blog or something. I guess no one is talking about WxWindows though?

So lets change the search to “Microsoft Windows programming”. Well there’s our friend Dave Wheeler again, I expected him to take the top spot though. He’s my new guru. (honestly, after reading his blog he seems really knowledgeable and I *did* subscribe to his web feed). The XML Paper specification takes the second slot, and the rest are all about the third edition Java Language Specification.

Ok, lets do a little vanity searching. the number one search term that causes people to end up at my weblog is “ArrayList.toArray“. There are seven results and I’m no where to be found.

Ok, let’s cheat a little. The results!

“Your search – site:lazycoder.com ArrayList.toArray – did not match any documents. “

Bummer.