Why Did Google Want Blogger?

SAN FRANCISCO -- Forget war and strife, the only news that mattered on the Web this week was Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs, the scrappy San Francisco startup behind the Blogger weblogging tool.
News of Pyra's sale for an undisclosed sum broke on Feb. 14, but details about the deal have so far been scant. Neither Google nor Pyra is saying much about it. Evan Williams, Pyra's co-founder, blogged his day-to-day life for the last three years right up until it got interesting. Williams pulled his blog offline earlier this week.
Meanwhile, thousands of weblogs and weblog indexes like Daypop and Blogdex have been loaded with debate about what the deal meant for the Web, for searching and for blogging. The acquisition has puzzled some onlookers: what would a search company want with a tool for making weblogs?
Someone in a unique position to speculate is Chris Cleveland, CEO of Dieselpoint, a search software company based in Chicago that worked with Pyra last year to develop a search engine for Blogger.
"We worked on this project for a couple of months and everything seemed to be going pretty well until about January when communication stopped," said Cleveland. "Now I know why."
Cleveland said Google's acquisition of Pyra would, quite simply, help Google create a more accurate search engine by adding rich new sources of data gleaned from weblogs.
The secret, Cleveland said, is in the scores of links webloggers create every day to content on the Web.
Google became the preeminent search engine by exploiting the structure of hyperlinks that make up the Web. Instead of using a simple keyword search, which is how most early search engines found their results, the company developed a proprietary system, called PageRank, which looks at hyperlinks as well as keywords to determine which pages are most popular on the Web.