Google Alert is Now Mixing the Blogosphere and the Web

I just noticed a change in my Google Alert. Instead of one alert it is now divided into two alerts, one for Google Blogs and one for Google Web. Is Google taking on a spherical approach? It is now clearly distinguishing between the blogosphere and the web, which is sometimes called the division between the dynamic web and the static web. But is that actually the case?

This is what my Google Alert from today looks like:

Google Alert

What struck me was that on the one hand the spherical approach with a clear distinction between (dynamic) blogs and on the other hand the (static) web. Google clearly distinguishes between “dynamic” blog posts and “static” pages as the alerts for the Blog Herald show. My blog post is filed under the alert for Blogs while my author page is filed under Web. Google Alert treats blog posts and blog pages differently.

A blog post is treated a dynamic page while an author’s page is treated as a static page. But wasn’t the whole point of permalinks to create a permanent and static link for a blog post? Google is now blending “the blogosphere” and “the web” and treating parts of the blogosphere differently.

8 thoughts on “Google Alert is Now Mixing the Blogosphere and the Web

  1. It seems this might be because posts are syndicated (RSS) which is not the case for pages..

    I allow myself one Google algorithm speculation per day, now I can get back to work :)

  2. I think this speculation is spot on because I recently looked at Technorati and Google Blog Search to see what they consider to be a blog. Google Blog Search states:

    Which blogs are included in Blog Search?

    The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

    But it is still interesting that they distinguish between posts and pages. They’re separating blogs.

  3. I like how Alerts break out into websites and blogs because it gives me a sense of what’s what right from the get-go; typically websites returned by the Alert are the bigger “news” sites and the blogs are smaller, more ad hoc sites.

    For bloggers, another question I’ve found being raised is whether the Google Alert app. is picking up their posts at all, or quickly enough, which I see as a two-part problem having to do with both the precision of the Alert search terms you use and your blog’s ranking.

    I’ve posted my thoughts on that here:
    http://www.greatcitydogs.com/2008/11/getting-your-blog-noticed-by-google.html
    with a link back to your post.

    – Rob

  4. I think ranking and the speed of indexing are correlated. For a while I received hardly any Google alerts but after posting steady for a few weeks Google’s indexing speed was catching up again. It actually caused some kind of indexing flood where it looked like crawlers were finally picking up old posts.

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