Wired News offers an understated reference to the explosion of Google-buys-Blogger commentary on the Web recently:
SAN FRANCISCO -- Forget war and strife, the only news that mattered on the Web this week was Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs, the scrappy San Francisco startup behind the Blogger weblogging tool.
Trying to answer the question in its headline, Wired talks to Chris Cleveland, CEO of a search-engine company.
"We worked on this project for a couple of months and everything seemed to be going pretty well until about January when communication stopped," said Cleveland. "Now I know why."
Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs.
Wired reminds us of one reason why <Flame War Provocation>Google is the best search engine</Flame War Provocation> with this history lesson:
Google became the preeminent search engine by exploiting the structure of hyperlinks that make up the Web. Instead of using a simple keyword search, which is how most early search engines found their results, the company developed a proprietary system, called PageRank, which looks at hyperlinks as well as keywords to determine which pages are most popular on the Web.
Now the meat of the argument:
The PageRank system combines keyword searches with a method of ranking the popularity of a target Web page based on the number of inbound links from other highly ranked pages.
That's where Blogger comes in. Weblogs are a rich source of links, which are posted in a fast, timely manner. Not only that, many weblogs are readable in RSS, or rich site summary, a standard syndication format that is easily parsed and indexed by search engine spiders, the bots that search engines use to crawl and index the Web.
"Web pages are hard to index without a standard structure," said Cleveland. "But Google can easily index RSS feeds."
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