Webupon

http://blogsearch.google.com

You can find your way to Google BlogSearch by clicking the link above.  Firstly, Google BlogSearch is simply the Google search engine but this time used to index blogs and their content.  It’s purpose to help you find posts in blogs that match your search criteria. 

Google have (and do) sift millions of blogs noting the name and content of the blogs and keeping this information in massive indexes which they search quickly to find the words you want.  That is how the results can appear almost instantaneously.

Google BlogSearch looks and behaves much like any other search engine, so enter the topic you want to search for and press the ’search blogs’ button.  Note that if you press the ’search the Web’ button, you will be using the normal Google webpage search.

To try this with me, type in the word ‘rice’ and press to search for blogs.  This gives, on the day I tried, around 11 million hits (searching the web would give over 125 million).  This represents the number of blogs which mention the word ‘rice’ somewhere in the content.  Of course, rice can mean different things to different people.  It can be the stuff you eat, an American university or even people whose name is Rice and a look a the results makes this plain.

But you can, just like a regular internet search, use an Advanced Search option to refine your results further by filtering out the results you don’t want, so let’s do just that.  Open the Advanced Blog Search option from the search page (it’s the printed words over on the right) and have a look at the page that opens.  The options are really quite self-explanatory.

I want to find a recipe for vegetable rice and I want boiled rice rather than fried rice and, just for the hell of it, I would like a recipe that was posted in the last year.  See the image above which will help you fill out the advanced search box and then try it yourself.

Incidentally, the SafeSearch option which you will already pre-selected is simply a filter that cuts out adult content, to avoid distractions I usually work with it on.

The search worked well and I have some good recipes to choose from.  There were about 10 thousand hits in all and, although I didn’t check each one, most seem to be what I was searching for.

Using any advanced search takes a little thinking about but it is surprising just how well it will work if you take your time.

Google have been indexing blogs since the middle of 2005 so older posts will not usually be found, also the index is built from site feeds so if a site does not publish a feed the blog won’t be included.  However, having said that, I think you will agree that there is sufficient content to produce meaningful results.

Google BlogSearch is an excellent way to find blog content and it worth playing with to get to know how it works and see what sort of content it can produce.