Title: Searching the Blogosphere
Author:
Section/SPIG: Health Administration
Issue Date:
With hundreds of thousands of Weblogs on more topics than you can shake a stick at, searching Blogs has become a bit of a problem. Why would you want to search a blog? For the highly current information that is often written by experts in the field and made available for you to read and to make use of. Searching the blogosphere is different from searching the Web. Blogs are updated more frequently (some multiple times per day) than the Web is, and traditional search engines weren't designed to keep up with the constant changes to the site nor with this type of information in mind.
A variety of search engines specifically made for searching Blogs are available such as Technorati at<http://www.technorati.com/>, Daypop at <http://www.daypop.com/>, or Feedster at <http://www.feedster.com/>. But no single Blog search engine covers a broad enough range of sources, and some are specific to one broad topic such as technology. Searching all the different search engines can be a pain.
Two new Blog search engines can make your life easier: Google's Blog Search and Clusty, a meta-search engine for Blogs. Google Blog Search (while still in Beta format) works very well. For most searches, I found Google's results to be comprehensive and up-to-date. Clusty sends your search request to multiple Blog search engines and compiles the results for you to examine. Both tools are worth trying out.
I examined two public health topics. The first search was on bird flu, a topic often in the news and of interest to public health practitioners. Clusty returned 292 results, but Google returned a lot more. The Google search also gave me the time the item had been posted (e.g., six hours ago, three hours ago) so I had a sense of its currency. It also gave me a list of five heavily used blogs on this topic. Clusty did give me a breakdown by topics such as flu vaccine, epidemic, Tamiflu and cost.
I also searched on mold public health effects hurricane. Clusty returned 67 results with a cluster of such topics as cleaning mold, New Orleans, control, government, health care, recovery and adverse health effects. Google turned up 317 results on a variety of topics relevant to mold, mold control, sicknesses caused by mold and so on. Google did not give me any blog names because the topic is so broad.
Check these blog search engines out at the links below and try your own searches:
Clusty's Blog Search <http://blogs.clusty.com/>;
Google's Blog Search <http://blogsearch.google.com/>.