List of Official Google Blogs

Today Danny Sullivan posted an entry in SearchEngineWatch that lists all official Google blogs. Coincidentally, this is a piece of information I’ve been looking for myself. The links listed in that post were XML files, which are difficult to read for most of us. So, I am listing these sites in a more friendly format below:

AdWords API Blog
Blogger Buzz
Blogs of Note
Google AJAX Search API Blog
Google Analytics Blog
Google Code – Featured Projects
Google Code – Updates
Google CPG
Google Custom Search
Google Talkabout
Google Web Toolkit Blog
Google Webmaster Central Blog
Inside AdSense
Inside AdWords
Inside Google Book Search
Inside Google Desktop
Official Google Base Blog
Official Google Blog
Official Google Checkout Blog
Official Google Docs & Spreadsheets Blog
Official Google Enterprise Blog
Official Google Mac Blog
Official Google Maps API Blog
Official Google Reader Blog
Official Google Research Blog
Official Google Video Blog
The Writely Blog

Combo Search

Combo search refers to a different way of presenting search results. In the Google world, people are used to see pages after pages full of only web search results, or image search results, or new search results, etc (with the exception of some sponsored links). This is, however, not the way search results are presented in Korea.

Let’s take an example: search for “cat” in Naver, Korea’s top search engine. You’ll see a long results page divided into many different sections, including sponsored results, news results, category results, local results, book results, movie results, blog results, music results, knowledge results (similar to Yahoo Answers), as well as web results. This way, users are exposed many different types of results for that query term, and the user experience is entirely different.

This type of search results display is possible in Korea because of its high broadband penetration rate. With dialup access, this type of display would simply take too long to download.

This is perhaps why Google is not able to gain much in the Korea market. Google is noted for the simplicity of its pages, but this may work against them in Korea, where users have come to expect to see a large variety of pages.

In this type of system, SEO for web pages becomes less important because web results themselves are less important there. Even if you make it to #1 in web search, you might still be way below the fold (depending on where the search engine decides to place the web results section). In Korea, SEO thus means looking into image search, book search, etc, in addition to simply web search.