Wednesday July 26, 2006

Google Blog Search bug

There is a definite bug in Google's Blog Search service. If you use the blogurl: parameter to constrain searches to your blog URL, you will get only 1 result, even if you know that the search term should occur in many pages. I wrote them an email (see below), but there has only been the usual canned response so far.

... I am writing in to report that what seems to be a recent bug in Google Blog Search. If I search for "energy" on my blog, there should be hundreds of results, because it is one of my areas of interest, but Blog Search returns only one result. It is not limited to my individual blog. Here's another example, from a friend who's using Blogspot. If I search for say, "work late" I will also get this single result. But if I search for "work women", I get another single result. Which means that if I searched for "work", there should be at least 2 results returned, but there is only 1 ...

I'm not the only one who's encountered this bug. Fortunately, Google Blog Search without the blogurl: parameter still works as expected, and through that I have found that the folks at googlesystem.blogspot.com and googlified.com have also come across this problem.

If Google does not fix this problem soon, I'll have to revert back to the built-in Lucene search engine as the default choice for the search box on the right. It'll be a little slower but it *does* return me my expected 500+ results if I search for "energy", as compared to just 1 for Google's Blog Search.

(2006-07-26 16:07:51 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

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