New features from Google Reader include a process that recommends blogs potentially of interest to the user, based on subscribed feeds and one’s Web History.
All the blog spidering and indexing by Google’s Blogsearch may be paying off for users of Google Reader.
Google’s team announced a couple of updates to the feedreading service on the Google Reader blog. One of the new items, discovery, involves recommending blogs to the viewer.
Discovery draws from what the person reads in Google Reader, and what has become part of that person’s Web History. The Discovery page lists new feeds, including their title, description, feed URL, number of posts per week, and number of subscribers.
The viewer can subscribe to a recommended feed by clicking a button. Alternately, a “No thanks” link removes the suggested item from the list of recommendations.
Once the individual adds some recommended feeds, the process of organizing them comes into play. Unless they prefer to dump all the feeds into one group and scroll through them alphabetically, the Google Reader user can drag and drop feeds into folders.
The drag and drop functionality also allows for reordering feeds within a list. Rival products have had this feature for some time, making Google a little late in delivering theirs.
The Reader blog touts the way Discovery can suggest new feeds for people hints at some behind the scenes work with Google’s Blogsearch, though it isn’t mentioned in the post. Blogsearch doesn’t get much publicity; it’s just there, and has become a highly effective way to look for information in blogs.
