google news is a weblog? news to me

March 27, 2002 9:03 AM

Is Google News Search a weblog? Internet.com seems to think so: 'Googleblog': Search Firm Gets into Weblogging...
posted by andrewraff to General Weblog-Related at 9:03 AM (9 comments total)

I'm glad to see a robotic dump of similar news stories from the wire is considered a weblog now. Sounds like a weak pitch to an article that shouldn't have been written. They even had to place the word "(weblog)" into the quoted answers from google reps. If that's not putting words (and meaning) into someone's mouth, I don't know what is.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:26 AM on March 27, 2002

I dunno, Matt, it can do a pretty darned convincing imitation. ("Hello? Mr Turing? I think we have a winner...")
posted by rory at 9:55 AM on March 27, 2002

Perhaps actually talking to someone at Google would have helped straighten this out...
posted by davidfg at 10:14 AM on March 27, 2002

Technically, it could be called a weblog, in that it is a series of "posts" in reverse chronological order... but I don't see any firm indicator that any one post is made before any other. How is this different than viewing the news feeds as they come off the wire?

Ultimately, my biggest beef would be "Where's the human element?" I don't see any sign of any particular selection process to the links - there doesn't appear to be a human behind the content.

So while I would argue that it might indeed be a weblog, I see no sign of anyone over at Google actually weblogging.
posted by insomnia_lj at 11:09 AM on March 27, 2002

On a side note, when I worked in IT, I occasionally made updates to a webpage about the latest technical outages. Does that mean I've been weblogging since '96? Hah.
posted by insomnia_lj at 11:19 AM on March 27, 2002

On a related note, here's a great interview with two google employees.
How many server on Google's cluster ?
We lose count. :) It's over 10,000 at this point. We're starting to get a little scared because we think that one computer has learned how to order other computers. ;) .
posted by riffola at 11:23 AM on March 27, 2002

Thanks, riffola - that was truly riveting. Specially that "full crawl of the web" once a month. Sounds exhausting.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:35 AM on March 27, 2002

well, it's clearly an aggregator. on the other hand, if you're going to define a weblog strictly by its format (a series of frequently updated entries in reverse chronological order), then the google aggregator clearly qualifies.
posted by rebeccablood at 3:20 PM on March 27, 2002

I'm waiting for the day when we see Googlebot substituting for Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner:

I've seen sites you people wouldn't believe. Flame wars off the shoulder of the Onion. I watched CNN glitter in the dark near the MetaFilter front page. All those links will be lost in time... like tears in rain.
posted by rory at 5:48 AM on March 28, 2002