Web log search engines

I was reading this morning about search engines for weblogs. Since I started Buziaulane, I had problems finding back some weblogs. But now weblog search engines start to pop up all over the place: technorati, bloglines, feedster, icerocket, blogpulse, blogslive, topicblogs and omni-explorer.

So I started testing some of them. I think I like Technorati.com the best so far. I typed in some subjects like World Summit Awards and EUROPRIX.nl and got hits and a lot of garbage. Then I discovered their exact search with quotations marks and it worked. No Google dilution of terms, but the straight links I was looking for.

The lists are very interesting. I started with “World Summit Award” on technorati.com. The search term delivered a list with 55 links with the latest posting (11 hours ago) from Belgium with the WSA entries for the Grand Jury. The earliest one was from 146 days ago. The mentions of WSA in the blogs came from people involved in the WSA, but also from other people. In order to read them all, you will have to start studying Arabic and Japanese. Here some samples:

یک هفته تمدید ثبت نام...
ارايه دستاوردهاي برتر ايران به رقابتهاي جهاني ‪ World Summit Award‬اعلام كرد كه همزمان با اجلاس جهاني

日本代表優秀サイト決定のご報告
World Summit Award - Geneva 2003 - Tunis 2005(WSA) http://www.wsis-award.org/

תחרות לבחירת תכנים...
משרד החוץ ואיגוד האינטרנט הישראלי מכריזים על תחרות ל"איתור מיטב התכנים הדיגיטליים והיצירתיות", במסגרת תחרות ה-World Summit Award הבינלאומית


Geographically, there are links from all over the world from American, Romanian, Pakistani to Tunesian blogs. Mostly these blogs tell about the competition. But there is also blog which is critical of the WSA. It is the blog Amsterdam, activists and academics about my strange encounter at Incommunicado 05. But it contains also a link to a blog on SIGGRAPH mentioning the initiative. The “EUROPRIX.nl”search term delivered 20 references.

I think that this search engine is going to make me very happy referencing my own blog postings.