With more than 10 million blogs online and their importance growing every day, the race is on to create the best blog search engine. In the past month, both Google and Yahoo! have unveiled long-awaited blog searches. Here’s a look at some of the best tools for searching blogs.
Google Blog Search
Google released its first blog search engine earlier this month to great fanfare. It has quickly won converts, though some deride it for not returning as many search results as its main competitor, Technorati. But that’s not where Google Blog Search shines. Google Blog Search is the fastest of any of the blog searches, and it generally does the best job of returning posts that are right on topic. If you want to find blogs about a specific subject, Google Blog Search should be your first choice: at the top of the search results, it lists a generally on-topic list of “related blogs.”
It’s worth noting that Google Blog Search’s focus is on relevance; if you want the most recent posts on a subject, you’ll have to toggle the results order to “by date” by clicking the link on the top right of the results page. Google Blog Search lets you subscribe to your search via RSS, so you can keep track of new postings on your subjects of interest.
Technorati
Technorati is the most established and popular blog search engine. The site will almost always return more total results on any search you do than the other blog search engines — but more isn’t always better. The results list the most recent postings first, and are often cluttered with unrelated and unreadable postings. Technorati can also be slow.
The site offers the most features of any blog search engine as well, with the ability to search blogs by “tag” (subject keywords), set up personal blog “watchlists” and generate lists of the most popular blogs and the most popular searches. Like Google, Technorati also lets you subscribe to your search via RSS, so you can keep track of new postings on subjects of interest.
Yahoo! Blog Search
Yahoo!’s Blog Search was much-anticipated, but appears to have fallen short of the others, so far. It doesn’t return nearly as many results as Technorati, nor find what you’re likely looking for as well as Google Blog Search. But what Yahoo! does is integrate its blog search with its news search, which is a handy feature if you’re looking for information, but don’t care whether it is on a news site or a weblog. When you search, the results on news sites are shown in the left column, and the results found on weblogs are listed in the right column.
Here are some of the other best blog search engines:
BlogPulse: This is an excellent blog search engine, but it’s most valuable for its extra tools. BlogPulse’s Trend Search allows you to create your own graphs, plotting blog buzz for search terms, and BlogPulse’s Conversation Tracker will gather related posts from across the blogosphere into threaded conversations you can follow.
PubSub: This site specializes in letting you create your own searches and then monitor weblogs, newsgroups and SEC filings for related info. You can read the results in a Web browser, via RSS feed, or in a special PubSub “sidebar” that sits in your Web browser and notifies you when new related items are found.
Feedster: One of the older blog searches, this has fallen behind Technorati in effectiveness. But it does cache blog pages, like Google’s main search caches Web pages, so it can be useful if you want to find a blog post that may have been recently changed or deleted.
IceRocket: A relative newcomer, it’s improving and offers a nice advanced search page that lets you search by specific date and blog post author.
Depending on what you’re searching for, you might find one of these is more useful to you than another. Which of these do you find the best? Which do you recommend for specific types of searches? Post your comments here.
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