If you are a blogger or blog reader, Google’s Blog Search tool is a must.  It allows you to to explore the blogosphere efficiently and effectively to find the topics you are interested in, generally or targeted for content, to find out what’s being talked about. All blogs that publish a site feed (RSS or Atom) are included in the searches with the Google blog index being continuously updated. It is much faster and returns more relevant and specific results than searching through Technorati and Feedster.

To use the search, you can select from the general topics listed on the left of the screen, such as Politics,  Business, Science, Entertainment, etc. or you can enter the word or phrase you want to search for in the search box to narrow the results. If you want to refine your search more, you can use the “Advanced Blog Search” by clicking on the link to the right of the search box. There, you can specify authors, languages, titles, time frames and more. You can choose to display your results with either the most recent or the most relevant blogs at the top.

To get a blog listed, it requires publishing a site feed. While recommended to set up automatic pinging, such as the Google Blog Search Pinging Service, it can also be manually submitted. Google periodically crawls and refreshes blogs that are added manually, though resubmitting will help insure that the latest posts are indexed.

Categories: Glossary
Tags: Blog Search, blogs