Fortunately, several search tools are available to help you find blogs and specific blog posts about the topics of your choice, and I cover three such tools in the following sections. However, it’s very important to understand that no search tool is perfect. In fact, more people complain about the relevancy of search results than applaud it, but based on the massive scale of the Web (Google indexes 1 trillion pages as of the company’s report in June 2008), it’s not surprising that search results leave something to be desired overall.
Blog search tools are imperfect at best, but they’re better than nothing. You can also ask your friends and colleagues about their recommendations for blogs they enjoy.
The more time you spend reading other blogs, the more cool blogs you’ll stumble upon accidentally, and that’s where the power of links and networking across the blogosphere becomes apparent. You need someplace to start though, and blog search tools are the best starting point to find blogs.
Technorati: Technorati has long been considered the best blog search site. The reason might just be because Technorati was the first site to index blog posts and pages fairly well. Today, it’s debatable whether Technorati is as valuable as it once was, but until the debate comes to a conclusion, the site is still considered a go-to place for blog searches.
One of the unique things about Technorati is that blog owners can claim their blogs on Technorati and provide additional information about those blogs. Doing so makes it easier for Technorati to include entire blogs within its search results as opposed to simply searching individual blog posts as other blog search tools do.
Google Blog Search: Google’s blog search tool is becoming the go-to place for blog searches, but it still isn’t perfect. You can’t search for entire blogs related to a search term. Instead, only specific blog posts that use that search term are provided in the search results. However, at the top of the page for most search results, you can find a small list of blogs about the search term, and this neat feature makes Google a best of both worlds created by Technorati and IceRocket.
Like IceRocket, Google Blog Search has a number of useful advanced search tools, but until you know specifically what you’re looking for, they won’t help you much. Also, Google Blog Search offers the same advantage as IceRocket in that you can narrow your search using date ranges, which is useful for finding current results.
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