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The following article is from Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2005 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com. “Blog” is a buzzword that has become popular only in the past two or three years. A blog, or web log, is a journal that is frequently updated and intended for public consumption. Blogs may be one person’s daily diary about his or her personal life, political views, or social commentaries. Other blogs are created by media giants, including the New York Times, CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and many others. In still other cases, a blog is an e-newsletter. The truth of the matter is that blogs can be published about any topic and shaped into whatever the author wants them to be. This genealogy newsletter is a blog. This week search giant Google introduced a search engine that only searches blogs. The new service is a great way to find current information about almost any topic imaginable. Google’s regular service is well suited for searching more or less permanent web pages. However, the new blog search is different in that it is designed to search information that changes frequently. For instance, a search for the word “genealogy” on Google’s Blog Search finds references to recent articles in this newsletter as well as in several other genealogy-related blog journals. Most of the results pointed to blog articles published within the past few days. The pages in Google Blog Search may be sorted by relevance (how closely they are related to the search term you specified) or by date. I searched for a number of words, including genealogy, roots, ancestors, ancestry and a few others. However, not all the articles found were directly related to genealogy. It looks like only about 75% of the listings were relevant to what I wanted. Nonetheless, I was able to find a lot of information about current happenings in genealogy. One thing that I noticed is the speed with which Google Blog Search indexes articles. One of my articles appeared on Google within four hours after it was added to the daily edition of this newsletter. If you would like to search blogs for any topic at all, including genealogy-related articles, go to http://www.google.com/blogsearch |
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