Google's Blog search is a truly fantastic resource. The breadth of its coverage of the blogosphere is awesome. Within minutes of me setting up my friends blog (brosdee), Blogsearch had the blog in its index. Provided you are set up to ping weblogs.com when you post (and perhaps one or two other places) you will almost certainly be in the Google blogsearch index and will be updated in near real-time.

This means that it should be possible for what I am calling G-Trackbacks to replace the need for trackbacking. At the bottom of this post you should find a "G-Trackback" link. If you post anything on your blog which links to this specific post within minutes if you follow the g-trackback link, sure enough, it should be there.

Who needs trackbacks when you can have g-trackbacks? Now all we need is for someone to hack some java code that writes the number of links that blogsearch can find, and I predict the demise of trackbacks. What of trackback spam? Well, at least with g-trackback the trackback will always post to a genuine link on a blog site. I doubt that many spammers will be bothered to actually give you a link in order to get a gtrackback.

Give it a spin, and consider implementing G-Trackbacks on your blog.

To do it on blogger just insert the following code into your template between your <blogger></blogger> tags. You will probably want it on the same line as pearmalinks, comments, etc. If someone can let me know the code for MT or other blogging platforms I will include it here also.

Blogger code
<a href="" hl="en&scoring="d&q="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$">&btnG=Search+Blogs">G-Trackbacks</a>


Update
Blogger have implemented a similar feature to this within the comments settings of Blogger.com. Personally I prefer my implementation as the links do not appear on your blog, but rather on a google search- thus perhaps reducing the tempation for trackback spammers.