Timely, comprehensive, accurate blog-searching website?

April 8, 2008 10:21 AM

What's the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date blog-searching site?

I've looked around and not really been very impressed with what I've found. I would've once upon a time thought Technorati, but now that site seems layered with so much crud that it really doesn't appear useful anymore. They've "lost the mission," so to speak.

Although I've usually been impressed with Google's offerings, Google Blog Search really doesn't seem to be anywhere near as frequently updated as a blog search tool should be.

What site do you use to do a broad sweep through coverage of a topic on the blogosphere?

(Extra karma for a site that has bookmarkable search URLs so that I could construct a Firefox keyword for same.)

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

I may have misworded the question very slightly. By "broad sweep" I'm not talking about headline-aggregators (i.e. "here's the top 10 from digg, the top 10 from reddit, etc."), although those are useful in their way. I'm more looking like Google for Blogs (but Google's own blog product really is nowhere near up to par, IMHO).
posted by WCityMike at 10:27 AM on April 8

Really those are the two that I use. A Google Blog search for MetaFilter returns a FPP that was made 45 minutes ago (as of this writing). A lot of currency is going to depend on how frequently the search engine crawls the site which for MeFi is often and for other sites, like my own personal blogs, may be once or twice a day. I think part of what makes a blog search decent is that the database is up to date and not full of spam and I've gotten pretty good results with both of those.

I also tend towards specialized search engines that may make custom searches out of maybe 10-100 RSS feeds and usually find that I get pointed where I want to be. LISZen is an example for my field, you might look into one that covers what you're looking for. Also, while I agree that Technorati may be a little full of linky nonsense when you look at it, it's hard to get a cleaner URL than

http://technorati.com/search/librarian
posted by jessamyn at 10:30 AM on April 8

I have three ego searches setup that seem to catch everything. One is a technorati search for my personal blog URL, the next is Google Blog search for my URL, and lastly I have a bloglines citation search for my blog's URL.

At this point, 9 out of 10 links to my blog show up on all three within a two-hour period (technorati seems fastest) but that still leaves 10% only showing up on one service of the three.
posted by mathowie at 10:44 AM on April 8

Thanks, guys. Looks like I'll need to re-evaluate the two engines I dismissed, and see if I can get them to produce better results for what I'm looking for. Maybe it's just my search language or settings.
posted by WCityMike at 11:43 AM on April 8

I do a lot of blog searching as part of my job, and in addition to the tools mentioned, I find consistently good results with rapid updating on Icerocket. As a disclaimer, I have friends who work on all of these search engines, and my employer probably has some business relationships with all of them, but speaking purely as a user, Icerocket is probably the least annoying, with Google blog search a close second. Also note, Google's Blog Search is particularly *fast* at some blogs (like TypePad blogs, which I'm most familiar with), so I'm surprised to see your results being sluggish.
posted by anildash at 6:05 PM on April 8

Thanks, Anil. Also, if anyone else is following this thread or comes across it later, I realized that the search box in Google Reader occasionally serves the desired purpose, too.
posted by WCityMike at 9:36 AM on April 9