Thing 3, Oh to Find A Blog

Blogging, blogging, blogging on this bloggy of all bloggy days. Yes, I am blogging about blogging and I am just about blogged out for now. It has been a virtual bloggorama.

So in looking at this Thing, I have now been exposed to blog search engines. I initially tried the suggested Technorati search engine, and found it fairly clean and easy to use. I used several search terms on topics I find interesting, and only received a few results that interested me. The search engine did what it was designed to do though, and seems like an effective tool. I did not find the Top Blogs very interesting, but that is a matter of opinion and taste. So I think it works pretty well.

From Technorati, I ventured into more suggested search engines listed on the About article. They need to update that article. OpinMind has dropped their blog search tool, which took me a minute to figure out. Blogdex is apparently being rethought. Sphere doesn’t appear to have any kind of search engine, but seemed to be selling various web based products. Maybe they did at one time, have a search engine that is. The next link on that article I tried was titled “Search Blogs with Ask.com” and I never actually found anything that provided access to the search engine mentioned. It does claim to work with something called Bloglines, but this sub article did not give access to even that. So I gave up on this and tried Google’s Blog Search.

Google’s product worked fairly well. It was clean and simple. Whether or not you like Google, they make good products, so I think it was the only one I looked at that was comparable with Technorati. As far as which was better, well I think they are fairly close in functionality. I have no preference.

So, I think the experience of see the blog search engines has been good. Now I know that they exist, and if a student asks, I can direct them to at least two decent search tools. Cool. I’m ready for thing 4.