Google gives a fitting reply to Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban of Icerocket made the accusation that Blogger is by far the worst offender when it comes to Spam Blogs - He even warned of throwing all Google blogs off his Icerocket blog search engine. Google was very quick to react and released two new features to combat blog spam and comment spam. (Score - Mark 1, Google 0)

Mark's warning to Google may have worked initially but Google had much bigger plans - Google Labs were secretly working on a another project Google Blog Search that could spell the untimely demise of Icerocket and other blog search engines. (Score - Mark 1, Google Wins)

Google BlogSearch is still in beta but looks promising already. If your blog pings Weblogs.com or other services, you are automatically included in Google index. You can search for posts by individual authors, subscribe to result feeds and sort the results either by relevance or by date (excellent).

Google has introduced four new search operators specific to blog search - inblogtitle, inposttitle, inpostauthor and blogurl.

There are however a few things that could have been better in Google Blog search:

1. Only blog posts from May 2005 are in the Google index.
2. Technorati is faster in crawling new information
3. Technorati style Cosmos (citations) would be useful
4. If you don't publish site feeds, Google won't find you
5. The Related pages feature needs some fine tuning.
6. Google could include the Top 3 results of regular web search in the results.

Time for Google is do all the talking.

Update: Mark did respond to the threat from Google Blogsearch arguing that Google is good but Icerocket is better

Google is fast. But it becomes very slow when you have to go to jump between their front page advanced search page in order to date delimit your search.

Google doesnt support Topics/Tags. Which means that when you do a search for a keyword and it returns 3k results today, well that same search might return 33k results next year at this time. Google has some nice search delimiters, but self inclusion in a topic by the author is probably the best.

And when it comes to subscribing to RSS readers from google competitors like My Yahoo , Newsgator and MSN, icerocket makes it easy. Just click on the icon. Google makes it an ordeal.

For reasons known only to Mark, the post has been deleted from Mark's blog. You can still view Mark's reponse in Google's cache.

David Sirfy of Technorati says Welcome to the party, Google!