When it comes to searching content in Blogs, the default search engine many people prefer is Technorati. 
The Technorati engine is totally dedicated for searching within blogs. Bloggers/Publishers can ping the Technorati service to notify Technorati of new content in your blog.
In many of the publishing software including WordPress, this can be be done automatically/programmatically.
Google has become a synonym for Search, however when it comes to blog search Google is way behind.
It doesn’t mean that Google Blog search is bad, its only that the indexing of new content in blogs take lot of time and the content you get is generally not “fresh” i.e. until now !
Yesterday Google announced the introduction of Ping service for blogs. Now Bloggers can ping Google to notify about the new content and I guess this should make Google blog search service more usable.
If you are using WordPress you can programmatically ping the Blog search using the Pinging Service API
The update service can be accessed via:
Administration Console -> Options -> Writing
Add the following URL in the Update services:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
I have still not tested whether pinging works properly, I will be testing it using this post itself 🙂
Test Update
After 5 min, I tried to search “Ping google” in Google blog search, however this post was not listed in the search results. Then I checked on the changes.xml of Google Blog search: http://blogsearch.google.com/changes.xml
I found my blog in the XML file, however the “rssUrl” field was empty !
As per the Pinging Service API, there should be 5 parameters with only one being optional.
Parameters: (should be sent in the same order as listed below)
- Name of site
- URL of site
- URL of the page to be checked for changes
- URL of RSS, RDF, or Atom feed
- Optional a name (or “tag”) categorizing your site content. You may delimit multiple values by using the ‘|’ character.
I am not sure if the rssUrl field is also mandatory ! Anybody had success pinging Google blog search ??
