Google Gets Around To Blog Search
from the fine,-fine,-fine,-here's-your-blog-search,-now-stop-bugging-us dept
Because of our corporate work we're always interested in better search tools for the blog world. In the last few years, not surprisingly, our customers have increasingly wanted to know our analysis on what's happening in the blogworld and to pick up info on trends, technology or news that could impact their business (and to explain what it all means in our standard pithy manner). So, we're always interested in the various tools out there to comb blogs -- and are constantly testing various offerings to see if they're worth tying into our backend system. For the most part, it's been all the little guys that you've probably heard of, and they all have pluses and minuses (many have more minuses than pluses, frankly). However, just about everyone's been waiting for "the big guys" to release their own blog search engines -- and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have rewarded that wait by showing almost no sense of urgency. That may be changing now that Google is the first of the big three to come out of the gate with a blog search offering. To be more accurate, it's an RSS and ATOM search offering, as it only searches feed content, rather than full blog entries. To be honest, at this point, there isn't much to say about it. It looks almost exactly as you'd expect a Google blog search engine to look. It seems functional, if not spectacular, though, it's likely that it will only get better with time. In many ways, it reminds me of Google News. When it first launched, it didn't measure up to others that were out at the time, but gradually improved to the point where it far surpassed most other offerings. Anyway, given how long some people have been waiting for a big search player to offer such a tool, this feels sort of ho-hum -- though, it's likely that some will still make a big deal out of it. Update: Someone just pointed out that their blog search doesn't include Techdirt right now. Oh well. Sure they'll get around to it eventually.
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Blog marketing
URL: http://ilps.science.uva.nl/moodgrapher/
(seems to be down atm from where I am, but I expect it's just temporary)
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Search Tools for the Blog World
1) Find blogs that you are really interested in - make sure they have RSS feeds.
2) Get an aggregator like Omea Pro, and subscribe to all the feeds directly from your IE or Firefox browser
3) Use Omea's Search Feed function, to automatically scan the blogosphere for keywords that you are interested in. The Search Feed function takes a record of every feed in the blogosphere mentioning those keywords, and turns them into an RSS feed, so you get updated immediately.
So now what you have, is every mention of specific keywords from the blogosphere, delivered directly into your favorite aggregator, each in their own RSS feed.
Then take it one step further...
4) Create Categories within Omea that pickup on the same keywords (or new ones) from your RSS feeds, emails, instant message conversations, newsgroups, bookmarked websites, and all the files you have.
Now you have one location on your computer, with all the information that you are looking for. It's personalized, updated continuously, and you don't need to search everywhere for it.
You can even keep it in your laptop, and catch up on all your information when you're offline.
Of course, Omea Pro also has a huge offering of Organizing features, for all your Info Sources (email, instant message histories, webpage bookmarks, contacts, tasks, RSS, and newsgroups), and Desktop Search functionality.
To learn about more tips'n'tricks with Omea, check out http://blogs.jetbrains.com/omea/
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