Google and Blogger

Wired News, Why Did Google Want Blogger

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.

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."

Like most weblogging tools, Blogger is capable of exporting new content in RSS. Based on XML, RSS is an increasingly popular format used by thousands of technology-oriented news sites such as CNN, The New York Times, Salon, Slashdot and Wired News, and well as thousands of weblogs.

Cleveland said Google will likely use Blogger to develop sophisticated searches that utilize the rich metadata inherent in the RSS feeds from weblogs: who wrote what and when, what it linked to, what linked to it and its level of popularity with Web surfers.