Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Glean Weblog-Free Google Results

With so many weblogs being indexed by Google, you might worry about too much emphasis on the hot topic of the moment. In this hack, we’ll show you how to remove the weblog factor from your Google results.

Weblogs—those frequently updated, link-heavy personal pages—are quite the fashionable thing these days. There are at least 4,000,000 active weblogs across the Internet, covering almost every possible subject and interest. For humans, they’re good reading, but for search engines, they’re heavenly bundles of fresh content and links galore.

Some people think that the search engine’s delight in weblogs slants search results by placing too much emphasis on too small a group of recent rather than evergreen content. As I write, for example, I am the twelfth most important Ben on the Internet, according to Google. This rank comes solely from my weblog’s popularity.

This hack searches Google, discarding any results coming from weblogs. It uses the Google Web Services API (http://api.google.com) and the API of Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/members), an excellent interface to David Sifry’s weblog data-tracking tool. Both APIs require keys, available from the URLs mentioned.

Finally, you’ll need a simple HTML page with a form that passes a text query to the parameter q (the query that will run on Google), something like this:

<form action="googletech.cgi" method="POST"> Your query: <input type="text" name="q"> <input type="submit" name="Search!" value="Search!"> ...