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Google's Blog Search engine, which is an adult in Internet years, surpassed Technorati in market share of visits last week, according to Hitwise's LeeAnn Prescott. The surge in traffic began in October, when Google placed a link to its blog search engine on Google News.

See, all it takes is a little exposure in the right place. Too bad Google hasn't applied that idea to its other services. Google Video struggled as well until Google linked to it on the homepage. That link has since been replaced with Groups, perhaps due to Google's acquisition of YouTube. Or maybe they're rotating promotions on the homepage.

Since Google placed the "Blogs" link in the "more>>" box at Google News in October, says Prescott, traffic to the blog search engine has spiked. Immediately, Google Blog Search jumped 168 percent in market share; the percentage of traffic from Google News rose from under one percent to 60 percent as of last week.

Prescott wonders why Google doesn't promote its services more in her blog post:

It seems to me that Google's delay in promoting its new services can prevent those services from being formidable competitors in their respective verticals, because only the geekiest folks know about them.

What's the point of putting the sharpest engineers on projects to build the sharpest web tools, only to have them flounder on Google's ever-expanding product page? In the case of Google Blog Search, maybe waiting wasn't such a bad idea, as it did receive poor reviews when it was first released.
But it may be that Google is amending its prior product throwaway strategy - a strategy Google exec Marissa Mayer said last summer had an expected 80 percent failure rate.

Or maybe Google noticed Technorati's recent difficulty producing speedy results or, at times, any results at all, and decided it a good time to bring their engine front and center.

Or maybe Technorati users noticed how often the engine errs, and remembered how Google had once shown up Alta Vista.

Either way, Google Blog Search has reached the top, and once a Google service gets away, it's hard to catch again.

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