jatiN mahindrA doT coM

A few weeks ago, we reported that Google released a major blog search update. That update fixed the issue with Google Blog Search finding content in the blogroll and thus showing irrelevant search results. It directly impacted the “blogroll detector” aspect of the algorithm.

Today I learned via a Google Groups thread that Google has finally updated the link operator aspect of that algorithm in Blog Search. That means, if you come up in the blogroll as a link, you won’t be shown in a link operator on Blog Search every time that blog writes a new blog post.

Jeremy Hylton explains:

We deployed our latest improvements for blogroll detection late last week. The change affects link: queries. We now drop most or all of the links that occur in the blogroll or in other parts of the page that are just boilerplate. I’m sure there are lingering problems, but our internal metrics suggest that its a big increase in quality for link: queries. We’ve got a few more improvements in the works, but I think this recent change fixed the biggest part of the problem.

As always, please send me specific examples where things have gone wrong. We’ll do our best to fix them.

The link command and blogroll issue with Google Blog Search has been an issue since November 2008 and I hope this update resolves it. Honestly, over the past day or so, it does seem to have been removing many (what I call) false positives in the search results.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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