Searching across blogs for everything during a specific period?

April 6, 2006 9:31 PM

I want to read as many blog posts as possible that were posted during a specific week-or-so period in 2004. What tools/sites can help?

This is for research for a novel. I know I can go to any given blog and navigate to its archives for the desired period. What I'm looking for is a meta-search that will return posts across many blogs, restricted to a given period. Do any of the blog aggregating sites (Technorati and company) have a feature like this? Or is there a clever way to get Google to do it? Any other thoughts about doing searches like this?

posted by staggernation to computers & internet (6 comments total)

It seems like many of the popular blogging programs use fairly standard directory structures. Could you do a Google search for pages which include */2004/01/*or something in the URL?
posted by box at 9:34 PM on April 6, 2006

Alta Vista's advanced search permits you to specify a date range. (I don't know how it determines the date for any given page, however.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:07 PM on April 6, 2006

The Daypop Archives may help you see what topics were popular at the time and give you some ideas for searching. Unfortunately, the citations aren't archived.
posted by shoesfullofdust at 12:31 AM on April 7, 2006

Many Weblogs use templates containing the text “posted on date”, and the vast majority of sites using phrases of this form are Weblogs.

Google lets you search numeric ranges, and these work even inside phrases.

Combine these two and you can find, for example, about 40 000 Weblog posts from the 17th to the 23rd of August 2004. Adjust as necessary for the date range you’re interested in.
posted by mpt at 4:12 AM on April 7, 2006 [1 favorite]

I never realized Google had a .. operator—that's great! Will have to do a few different queries to account for variations in date formatting, but this will be very helpful. Thanks!
posted by staggernation at 8:23 AM on April 7, 2006

My blog is the top two results on the 40,000 weblog posts link! Woo hoo!
posted by bjork24 at 11:20 AM on April 7, 2006