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Interestingly, with the exception of the 8th most popular term (sarah kozer) where a weblog came in at 10th place, not a single weblog was in the top 10 of any of the other terms. This can't be correct I thought. So I looked at a couple of other terms. I chose 'turtles' as Andrew Orlowski used it as an example in his piece for The Register. No weblogs. So I chose a few other current hot topics, 'SARS', 'human cloning', 'what's on TV tonight' and 'Britney Spears'. No weblogs, or at least none that I saw. I can't claim that I closely inspected all the search results though I did spend longer on the last search ;-)
If we can conclude anything from these informal tests of Google then perhaps it's that we get a little bit more realistic about the prominence of weblogs and the danger that they'll in some way diminish the quality of search results.
There is no doubt that depending upon what you search for you will of course get weblogs in your search results. A search for 'Dave Winer' shows little but weblog results but hey, Dave's a weblogger so what do you expect? Also, by searching for terms that are the attention of the communities of practice that I discussed in the preceding piece then here too I expect to find a prominence of weblogs in Google search results. But that's what I think the Internet is so good at, creating communities. And thank goodness we have Google to help uncover their richness.