The online world of the blogosphere has taken another step towards being easier to browse. Google has updated its own Blog Search homepage in a very interesting way. Before, the Blog Search was mainly a normal looking search page that was dedicated to searching blogs reporting on topics across the web. But now the homepage of Blog Search has been given a makeover to show the most popular topics as soon as you hit the page.
Now, when you go to the homepage, you're shown the most popular stories clustered and ranked depending on the popularity of the topic. Popularity is also now calculated based on the number of blogs discussing the topics and also the time since the story first appeared.
Topics are also listed down the left hand side of the page, so you can choose from areas such as technology, science, or entertainment instead of scouring what's popular in the general blogosphere for what you're interested in - handy as just because something is popular it doesn't mean it will pique your interest.
Another fascinating feature added to the service is that when you click on the number of blogs focused on a particular topic you are shown a graph, tracked in 16-hour stints, of how the popularity has been spreading since the story hit the web. Below is an example of the graph for this particular story:
The separate stories themselves will also be reordered as they gain interest or prominence, although this is a system that Google has not given away the inner workings of.
Other competing services such as Techmeme and Blogrunner have offered a similar view of the news on the web before but with one big difference, Google has the search index power to make this much more useful and a lot easier to track how popular an item is when searching for it.
There is however one very obvious downside, and it's surprising that Google may have overlooked it: the lack of an RSS feed. There is currently no RSS feed option for viewing what the homepage spits out or for the top stories in the topic areas. Although you can still get feeds for the search terms you put in, a lot of users are going to be wondering where this service is for the top stories.
This new look is currently only available in English although the Google Blog has suggested that they plan to support more languages in the next few months, along with continuing to add new features.
