It has been months since Google somehow started to omit TMCnet blogs from their BlogSearch service. Since the service is so popular we wanted to find out we were delisted and se if there was a technical problem.

 

After months of writing to Google to ask what the problem was, Tom Keating wrote a blog entry titled Google Blog Search Sucks where he mentioned he loves Google but the BlogSearch service leaves much to be desired. His concerns centered around MFA (made for Adsense) sites being listed and other non-blog sites such as EE Times and even a Wiki.

 

Thankfully the blog entry caught the attention of Google and an engineer responded a few days later to tell us there was a bug in their system and they have fixed the bug and TMCnet blogs are now listed.

 

Interestingly, my blog hasn’t been showing up on Technorati for about a year and we don’t know the reason. We have sent many e-mails to Technorati and there seems to be no way to solve the problem.

 

Similarly we have been trying to get TMCnet news added to Yahoo News and normal channels haven’t worked.

 

A very important point Tom makes is that the dotcoms have horrendous customer service. We have sent e-mails to Yahoo! for three years asking how we can get included in their news service and there has been no response.

 

At least in Technorati’s case I sent a letter to the president and I received a response. The company never solved the problem but at least I got something in my inbox that shows there is a human at the other end.

 

Sure algorithms are fine but in the end, you need to respond to your customers when your algorithms have problems. And for this I would like to thank Google for responding eventually to our request.

 

Here is Tom’s latest post on the matter titled: Google Blog Search Doesn’t Suck?