Gregory Blake is one of the latest to complain about all the garbage postings coming out of blogspot.com. That issue was part of the motivation for putting up the changes yesterday to detect result sets dominated by single sources. Of course that only helps if you’re using the website for your searches. But there are a bunch of other tools (like NetNewsWire) that provide shortcuts for subscribing to search feeds. In order to exclude blogspot all you have to do is append -site:blogspot.com to your searches. Here’s a screenshot of what that would look like in NetNewsWire 2.0 beta:

Subscribe to a search excluding bloglines

We’re actually considering turning blogspot.com off by default because of how bad the results are in some areas. Rafer has some additional commentary. It would be really unfortunate to have to turn off that whole domain just to clean up the results. It would get rid of spam, but it would also get rid of good content. There are some great blogs over there (Susan Mernit, Ted Shelton, re:invention, 106Miles, Small Busines Trends, Steve Jurvetson, and Anita Wilhelm - just to give the blogspot blogs I’m currently subscribed to). So my personal preference would be to not turn off the blogspot.com results by default, and ask everyone to bear with us while Google takes care of the issues with the content of the blogspot domain and we tune our spam detection. But please let us know what you think. Blogspot.com excluded by default?