ResearchBuzz

Local local local local. Blewspace http://www.blewspace.com/ looks like a fairly new site that allows you to browse a map for blogs. There are only about 300 blogs listed at the moment, but it’s easy to register and add your own.

I suggest zooming in a bit on the map or you’re going to have a hard time telling exactly where the blogs are. Click on a marker and you’ll get a bubble with the name of the blog, URL, and a few words about it. If you don’t feel like browsing, you can also search by topic, author, and blog title.

Pretty small at the moment, but I like the interface. The blog mentions a lot of upcoming features, including RSS feeds…

I haven’t used Feedster seriously in a couple of years — I do remember when I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced toothpaste, but that was a long time ago.

Still, I was a little shocked when I realized I knew Feedster had disappeared only because it wasn’t serving search results to Zuula. Had I not wondered about that, I would have missed the big green sign at Feedster.com: “Feedster is Changing… We’ll be back up soon with exciting news!” (I’m getting a date of November 6 on this page.)

I wondered if the front page alone had just been taken down, but searching Google for site:feedster.com inurl:feedster found lots of cached pages, but no currently-available pages. It appears to be gone gone.

For blog search, I find myself using Zuula more and more. There is a amazing lack of overlap between engines… IceRocket is not Bloglines is not Technorati is not Google Blog Search, etc. Zuula serves up results quickly with an easy-to-use interface.

In other AWOL blog search engine news, I can’t get Daypop.com to respond at all. I mentioned a year ago that it had been down since May. We still miss you Daypop!

So I’m here at Web Search University. Yesterday I gave a presentation on Information Trapping. I covered, among other things, blog searching. When I was finished Jeremy H came out of the audience to chat. Jeremy is an engineer at Google and the terrific guy who first told me about the change in Google’s daterange: syntax.

“So why didn’t you mention Google Blog search?” he asked.

“Because it’s got so much spam in it,” I answered, ever the diplomat.

He asked me how I was sorting the results, and I said by date. Because if you’re information trapping you want the most recent stuff, not necessarily the most relevant stuff. And since the only options were most recent or most relevant, what could you do?

Aha, said Jeremy. How about using the links on the left? On the left of a Google Blog Search result page, there are several links to narrow results to a specified time frame — last hour, 12 hours, whatever. But isn’t that like a date search? I asked.

In fact, it isn’t. Jeremy explained that when you narrow your search by time using the links on the left, the results from that time span are sorted by relevance. In other words, you’ll still get results by relevance, but only for the time span you specified.

I had no idea I could use the left nav that way. That might be a great way to dodge spam on Google Blog Search, especially when you’re testing queries for information trapping. The only downside is that this particular sorting option isn’t available on Zuula.