The Real Blogger Status

We see an occasional sign of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I let my readers search my entire blog? or Why does my Search not find all of my posts? Both of these questions - and more - are seen, because not every blog owner is aware of the limitations, and possibilities, of each search technique.

Long ago, Google provided Google BlogSearch, as one a way of surfing the blogosphere . One of the challenges of using BlogSearch was that we were never sure what we were surfing. Some people wanted to see only "blogspot.com" published Blogger blogs - and other people wanted to see all Blogger blogs, including those not published to "blogspot.com". Some ingenious blog owners published "Blogger blogs" of doubtful integrity, simply using the URL of "blogspot.com" - and people accepted such blogs as righteous, simply because Blog Search would list them in a search page.

We've seen a number of reports, in the recent past, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about inability to search Blogger blogs. It appears that the problem is with the Google "Custom Search" . Both the Google gadget (available from the CSE website), and the Blogger native gadget (available from "Add a Gadget"), appear to be broken. The current workaround is to install a direct blog search, as an "HTML / JavaScript" gadget . The direct blog search offers few options, such as the ability to offer contextual web searches, offered by the CSE search. Right now, though, it appears to be the only option available. >> Top

This week, we have a question asked, in Blogger Help Forum , which has been on my mind, in various formats, for some time Does anyone know what Google does with it's residual copies of blogs after deletion? What's in the search engines may stay there forever. There is more than Google Search (really, there is), and the various search engines feed on each other . Replacing content with a stub may remove cached content selectively . Fuzzing / smokescreening your data may get rid of your personal data, or may make it less visible at least. You can't get rid of everything that says something "bad" about you . People have opinions, you will always have some enemies, and your enemies will always have something bad to say about you . Even Mother Teresa probably had somebody who said bad stuff about her. Look at social scrapbooking, like Yahoo Glue . Something added to a Glue page, true or not, will be indexed by the search engines. Even if a Glue page is scrubbed, th...

Today marked yet another milestone in the ability of Google to make a mistake, admit to the mistake, and fix the mistake on the same day (and on a weekend morning even). Seen all over the web. Affecting my blog, "networking.nitecruzr.net" (among millions of others). Even, affecting WikiPedia. Supposedly, identified and fixed less than an hour after discovered. Apparently, this resolution is in the magnitude of the bx-sp4hmm error of 28 February 2007 . >> Top