Google buys Pyra! This is major. Ev, Jason and the gang rollerblading in the GooglePlex... hmm.

Everyone seems to be wondering why this happened - as in, what use is a content hosting service to a search company?
A lot of people are saying that there's going to be a "Blogs" tab now, beside the News and other tabs. Some people are also wondering if Blogspot sites will get a better pagerank.

But why buy Pyra? Why not just get 20 people to build Blogger in a month? Here's what I think: It's all about the data™. In Page and Brin's paper - The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - the base assumption was that the WWW is a huge interlinked connection of information. And you know what's incredibly funny? The Blogosphere is just that - a small scale WWW.

What Google has actually bought themselves is 3 years worth of activity data, hit counts, and other detailed information for about a million weblogs, out of which 200,000 are active. This gives those mad scientists at Google a TestBed - a way to perfect their algorithms to provide important and accurate search information - by checking usage data to see if it was correct. And since the web is slowly converting itself into a huge blogosphere, Google will have the resources to evolve the search algorithms as well, to provide quick and correct information.

As for Blogger, I don't think much is going to change, other than huge improvements in server uptime. The Pyra team will most probably be responsible for maintaining the service like it is, while the Google scientists use the data the service generates.

Of course, this is all complete guess work (Just after writing this, I found a /. comment similar to my thoughts) - Let's wait and see if I'm right.