8/30/04 - 3:15 PM - Our travels this time around take us to Elise Bauer's blog, where she attempts to analyze market share and size through Google. As we discussed earlier, using Google to analyze information is useful, but can result in some confusion.
What Bauer does is record both how many pages found in a Google search link to a particular option's domain, as well as how many pages are contained on that domain's server.
Bauer defines the "Weblog Use Index", which she describes as "an index of market influence based solely on Google results", based upon these two searches. While the full results can be found on her site, her findings would seem to indicate, as she says, "...what we would expect in general". Blogger and LiveJournal, according to the Weblog Use Index, are way ahead of the rest of the field.
Blogger Oldcola, though, points out one of the inherent problems in analyzing blogs in his commentary on Bauer's post.
Oldcola points out a blog of his, for example, that is known by very few people and only really used as a personal site of his. While very few people knew about it, it was still a blog. Since there are no links to it anywhere, Google doesn't know about it—as a result, it's not recorded as an actual blog. When Oldcola looks at the Google results of his own blog, he finds that 95% or so of the links that come up in a search for his site are "contaminated" and irrelevant.
So, then, we are led to the question that we previously considered—if we can't trust Google...who can we trust? Without concrete information from providers on how many users they actually have, along with an analysis of blogs not hosted on or using software from the common providers, we are left with only a partial view of how huge the blogging world actually is.