Google is reportedly set to launch a new way to browse its News service. Flipper will let you view the results of your searches in a magazine format. This more visual way to browse the news should make it quicker to get a feel for which stories you want to read. It should be a natural format for quick scanning on a touchscreen device like the iPhone, too.
It’s not only Google News that needs an overhaul though. Another important search tool from Mountain View is in desperate need of some TLC. Over the past few months Google Blog Search has gone from being a useful resource for scanning the state of the blogoshere to difficult-to-navigate bucket of spam blogs and automatically generated Delicious link lists.
If you’re searching for what blogs are saying about a particular subject you want to cut out all the spam and automated nonsense and just get down to what matters – original content, indexed quickly. It’s unclear why it’s happened but Google Blog Search is no longer fit for purpose.
Nearly 24 hours ago here at The Next Web we published a story called “Stop Hating on IE6! You’ll hurt its feelings!” You’d think Google would have indexed it by now? Apparently not. A search for the phrase “Stop hating on IE6” returns four results – all of them contain references to our post but none of them are the actual post. In fact, the references to the orginal post are from people’s Twitter streams, embedded in their blogs.
So, if you want to find a post in Google Blog Search you’ll have to go via someone’s tweet, via their own blog. Rival blog searcher Twingly finds the original post straight away.
While Flipper looks like a nice new way to use Google’s existing search technology, that search technology appears to be crumbling away.
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