About the video and news bars on the left

If you are wondering about the new look side-bar on the left, with the panel of videos and the news headlines (courtesy of Google), those are the latest Blogger widgets, and I'm taking them out for a provisional spin. I thought I'd give them a try when I saw the announcement of their availability on the Blogger home page yesterday, and upon playing a bit with them, found some interesting material both in the video and news categories. Both widgets display top results from Google for search terms I enter into the widget (see list of terms at top of the News column).

For now, the results appear to be relevant (or at least in the ball-park of this blog), but already I can see that terms have to be chosen with care. For example, "evolution", doesn't work as well as "evolutionary biology" in the news search, and looking for "global warming" videos brings up something called The Great Global Warming Swindle. Now, as a participant in that conspiracy/hoax, and a member of the reality-based community, I can't let you watch that can I? So I had to find something better by searching for "bush on global warming" - and hope you enjoy the results.

I have to wonder how long these widgets will remain useful, though, given the potential for irrelevant (or anti-relevant) search results to show up. Will this lead to new mutations of the google bomb? I guess I'll keep them on as long as they produce results consistent with the domain of this blog. Let me know what you think.