Google has relaunched Google Blog Search with its own memetracker. A memetracker takes all the latest blog posts about popular news and issues and aggregates them to make browsing the latest topics much easier.
Google's new page lists a variety of broad topics like Politics, Technology, Entertainment, and so on. The most popular topics are featured with a cluster of blogs written about that subject, making it easy to narrow down subjects to your specific interest.
Google uses a similar thing design with Google News, where you see a given subject--for example, the new Nintendo DS announcement--and underneath that subject's top story you see a link like "all 309 news articles."
This method of clustering blog topics is a great way to see what's been written without having to do a manual search. But will Google's new approach be popular?
Google Blog Search has a few strikes against it. It has to contend against already popular memetrackers in popular categories, like Techmeme, which covers Tech News, and its sister site Memeorandum, which covers political news. Also, the new page is not the most visually appealing design I've ever seen.
One thing I do like about the new Blog Search is the handy graph it uses for specific topics. Once you are looking at all the various blogs on a given topic, Google provides a graph that shows you when the blogs were written over the last day. This could come in handy for bloggers who may be trying to figure out what's hot and what topics are already starting to wane.
Google has a habit of creating popular consumer tools, but it's too early to tell whether the new Google Blog Search will be a hit or a Chrome-style flop.
