How Google Blog Search Works

Before Google Blog Search, it was a bit of a shot in the dark trying to find information in the blogosphere. There is no single organized directory of blog sites, nor of the frequently updated content of all the blogs that exist today. The blogosphere is quite chaotic, and constantly changing; Google’s traditional method of crawling the Web for updated information, which normally takes a few weeks to update, was simply too slow to index blog content.

The solution to this problem came in the form of site feeds. A site feed is an automatically updated stream of a blog’s contents, enabled by a special XML file format called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). When a blog has an RSS feed enabled, any updated content ...

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