Ten years ago, I first saw the word “Google.” Yeah, there was this dinky search engine with nothing on the page the teacher told us about, but Yahoo! ran the web-search show; this instance was a book about counting. Today, Google makes at the minimum 4 different parts of speech, and infinitely more search results, enough that that book is buried in 193 million hits. Google’s blog search is a tool that indexes millions of blogs (including this one) and will search for keywords. I searched my specialty topics and was faced with everything, from news articles to press releases and campaign propaganda.
After reading the first few blogs, which ranged from copy and pasting of the news to full blown political commentary I finally saw something that caught my eye. A watchdog, (something that the media in general is supposed to do) that discusses, rather critically the government’s handling of port security. However, upon further research, you will realize, after 6 consecutive posts buried about an Abu-Dhabi based floating barrier company, that indeed, this blog is written as a marketing piece. Googler Beware.
Unfortunately, this is the nature of Google Blog Search. You have to look in depth to realize what you’re getting into. Two interesting pieces to look at were: a “FrumForum” blog post about McCain’s war against illegal border crossings in his home state of Arizona, which explains that he is bound by the conservative party’s hopes of regaining political power, however a murder gave his campaign new hope; and secondly, an article about something I’ve already blogged on, the US/Canada border and its (lack of) protection. 
(By the way, YMMV stands for “Your Mileage May Vary,” a common disclaimer on any piece of advertising claiming good fuel economy for a car, meaning that you probably won’t get anything that great)