March 27, 2004

Microsoft said MSN Blogbot will debut in the first half of the year, along with MSN Newsbot, a search site devoted to news.

Microsoft became the first big Internet company Friday to say that it would create a special search Web site just for Weblogs.

The service will not index all blogs, just the ones that MSN determines provide the most useful information, a company official said.

"We will look at credibility and popularity to get people the information they're looking for,'' said Karen Redetzki, a product manager for MSN. ``There are some blogs that may not be relevant to people. Those blogs we may never index."

Redetzki said Blogbot would look similar to the company's Newsbot service, which will automatically index news stories from around the world. A test version of Newsbot is at http://uk.newsbot.msn.com/.

Several Web sites are already dedicated to searching blogs, including www.daypop.com, www.blogdex.net, www.popdex.com and www.technorati.com. Google indexes and provides search results for blogs, as does Yahoo. But neither company separates blog listings from their regular search results.

The actual number of blogs is not known. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to 2 million. At last count, Technorati was tracking 1,973,555 blogs, though it is not clear how many of those are being regularly updated.

Source: Mercury News

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