Despite the gripes about Google Blog Search and its inability to filter out spam, the site has been improving steadily. It now indexes lots of non-news content as long as it is published in a feed.
For example. Google Blog Search does a nice job of indexing digg. A search for the term Vista turns up nearly 6,000 results. However, Google only lets me view the first 1000. Still, I can subscribe to this search as a feed so I'm not particularly concerned that I can't go back further. Digg has its own search and RSS capabilities, but it's not as fast as Google's and I can't get a total count of results.
Google Blog Search's capabilities go beyond digg. They're also now indexing stories on Inform.com, YouTube (in a limited way) and forums like Neowin.net. At one point they were indexing Yahoo Answers content but I have not been able to replicate this today. Google also crawls some mainstream media blogs, like David Pogue's and have added Vox to the list of platforms they crawl. Last but not least, they spider Techmeme. This is especially handy since I can track when my blog pops up on the site.
As the media universe expands beyond blogs, the major search platforms will all need to scale and make sure they index and measure the key sites. In 2007 I am sure this will be a recurring story as the different tools try to out do each other. The winner in all of this will be the end user.
