Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

Google Blog Search relaunched a month ago with a new look, and functionality changes.  One of them is making the ego-blog-searchers (like me) irritated times five.  Now when you search for links to your site, the new Google Blog Search pulls in links from people's blogrolls in the sidebar (not helpful to see week after week).  They didn't used to do this – somehow filtered it out, but now it's happening and it's annoying.  I'm also not a big fan of the new look (much more cluttered).  The top topics/stories are listed in the main body of the page with the search box at the top and a list of eleven broad topics on the left, which you can then view the top stories for.  I see this as a "blog search for people who don't know what blogs are" type of approach.  And tech sites have complained that Google Blog Search, specifically it's Technology category, will make Techmeme irrelevant (a popular-with-techies site that indexes tech blogs specifically).

I haven't heard much from the biblioblogosphere on this, and I'm curious – what do y'all think?  Is this working for you?  Is it working when you're using it as a tool to help library users?  It's been up for a month, so how has the test drive gone?  Or do you not even use it?

For more reviews of the new Google Blog Search, I suggest reading the posts on ReadWriteWeb and Search Engine Roundtable and the Google Blog Search Help Pages.