A couple of days ago Google announced that it would be creating a separate tab for blogs. A lot of people, not least Andrew Orlowski, who broke the story, seem to think that blogs are destroying the fabric of the internet. Much like the Sun saying that asylum seekers are tearing the UK apart, they’re offensively wrong.

The following is the text of a message that I posted to the Webdesign-L mailing list on this subject:

So far the blog indexing conversation has focussed on the negative or subtractive aspects. I think there are many positive aspects to indexing blogs properly.

Blogs are updated at least weekly, often hourly, but their content only changes minimally. Identifying blogs will give Google the ability to derive algorithms that are much more suitable for the task, e.g. incrementally updating the index. They won’t have to index every single post/comments page on a blog as often as the index page, so they can spend more time doing other stuff.

One of the key usefulness of blogs is that they pass stuff around very quickly. They don’t always do this perfectly accurately however, and maybe Google can start looking at ways to filter 100,000 slightly wrong blog entries into one more accurate source. Perhaps choose the entry with the most correct facts (as judged by popularity) or something along those lines.

I also think that the effect on the main index if they do remove blogs will be minimal, even negative. Although many blogs are useless guff, many are also very useful link pages. If I’ve spent time solving a problem, I often write up my solution and include links to the pages that helped me out. Somebody looking to solve the same problem would benefit from the filtering work I’ve already done as humans are rarely worse than machines at assessing information.

I for one think that a separate blog tab is a very exciting idea and I’m interested to see what Google do with it.

As well as this I agree with points raised by other people that whilst 90% of blogs are shite, 90% of everything is shite. Blogs are as useful a type of content as news sites, review sites, product pages, reference pages and all the other menagerie of stuff you get on the web.

Note I’m not pompous enough to think that this blog is a vital part of the internet, I’m talking about blogs in general.