Blog Search side(bar) effects

[Karen J. Cravens]

I have a search on my blog name, as I'm sure a lot of people do.
Recently Blog Search has started picking up its appearance on
blogrolls, which means I'm getting false positives every time someone
posts to a blog that has me in their blogroll. And it's a contextual
snippet, which means I can't even use it as a substitute for
subscribing to that blog (which I often already am, meaning I'm
getting doubled volume in Reader).

I can see the point in searching the whole page, given the number of
feeds that are partial, but if GBS isn't savvy enough to leave out the
static content, it's of no use to me.

[Jeremy Hylton]

We have changed the way we index blog posts to include the full
content of the page. We've had occasional complaints about the use of
the feed content, particularly the problem with partial feeds that you
mentioned. The indexing change has improved the results for a lot of
queries, both because we have the full content of the page and because
we extract links that are missing from the feeds. The downside of
this change is that we see more results that match only the blogroll
and other parts of the page that are common to all of a blog's posts.

We expected some problems from blogroll matches, but may have
underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or
where the query matches a blog or blogger's name. We do expect to fix
the problem you're seeing. We'll use the full page content, but
exclude the content that isn't really part of the post. I'm not sure
if we'll be able to make the change before the end of the year, but we
are working on it and are pretty confident that it can be solved.
We'll post an update here when we've got a solution.

Jeremy Hylton
Google BlogSearch