Angry in the Great White North

Blogrolls are great, but they don't help you find a specific story or stories on a particular subject. I've always maintained keyword lists on all my posts, and I've finally gotten around to utilizing them properly.

At the end of each post, just before the comments, you'll find a block just to the right of the Google Video Ad (watch the video ad...watch the ads....you're getting sleepy....these aren't the droids you're looking for...). The block has three sections.

The first block contains a list of prefilled links to Google custom search engine queries using the keywords I've associated with the post. The custom search engine is one I've constructed that lists all the Canadian political blogs as presented by the blogrolls (Blogging Tories, the Liblogs, the Blogging Dippers, and so on). You click on a link like Stephane Dion and you go to a Google results page that lists all the indexed stories from Canadian political blogs that contain that search term.

This is not the same as a the Google Blog Search. A custom search engine is driven by a specific list of websites, not a list of feeds. As of yet, you can't create a custom blog search that is limited to a specific list of feeds. So the limitation is that if a particular blog is not indexed in the main Google index, stories won't appear. It is also not as timely. The delay in indexing a change in a site can be measured in days or even weeks. The blog search engine indexes in minutes. But to get a view of what Canadian bloggers have written on a particular subject, I need to use a custom search engine. If I use the blog search engine, I see what all bloggers have written, and unfortunately Google is indexing a lot of spam blogs right now. I've trading timeliness for quality and focus.

Hopefully some of you will still find it useful.

Next is the Sphere search. Sphere is a comination blog and news search engine. It works by analyzing the content of your story and presenting what it thinks is related material from blogs and online news sites. Nice idea. The drawbacks are an American-centric view of news, as well as limited participation by major Canadian blogs.

Finally, there is Technorati. The granddaddy of blog search engines still does a good job of finding related material, and somehow continues to work despite the encrouchment of spam blogs.

You can help improve the quality of these searches by making sure your blog, if you run one, is known to Technorati and the Sphere. And you can enhance your blog-reading experience by using these links to check out other points of view out there.

Enjoy.