Can Daypop Stay Out of Google's Headlights?

How much of a Midas touch does Google wield? Google News -- still in beta -- has more mainstream cachet than AltaVista News, AlltheWeb and NewsIsFree combined. So when Reuters (and the Register) picked up a comment Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently made about offering a service for searching weblogs, Daypop's Dan Chan was concerned. "Well it was fun while it lasted..." wrote the man behind the popular weblog and news search tool, Daypop, assuming he was dead meat.

Not a very comfortable position for Dan Chan, is it?! Though Google hasn't officially announced anything to the effect, its quite clear that once Google flings itself wholeheartedly into the "weblog search" pond, the smaller fish will be thrown out unceremoniously!

Chan knows that there's no way he can compete with Google and that they could take all his traffic in a heartbeat. He's nervous but stays optimistic that Google could perhaps lift all boats by bringing more attention to weblogs. Or is that the rationale of a deer caught in the headlights? [via Online Journalism Review]