Blogs

On the surface, weblogs (or blogs for short) are simply a format for publishing information online by placing new information at the top of the page. But dig a little deeper, and you realize that blogs have changed the way people communicate and consume information.

At the time of this writing, the blog-tracking service Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) estimates that 75,000 new blogs are created every day; over 35 million blogs are already in its index. This global network of blogs (often called the blogosphere) shows no signs of stopping, and Google offers some specialized tools to help you tune in and take part.

Blogger

To start publishing in the blogosphere, look no further than Blogger (http://www.blogger.com).

Blogger is a free service that provides everything you need to start writing a blog, including web-hosting space. The signup process literally takes less than five minutes, but don't let its simplicity fool you. With Blogger, you can start multiple blogs, post by email, customize your blogs' designs, collect comments on posts from readers, and publish your blog to a remove site via FTP or Secure FTP.

Blogger.com provides a simple posting interface where you type your rants, raves, opinions, or news into a form. Click Publish Post, and your words are on the Web.

Google Blog Search

Google recognized that blogs are a bit different from standard web sites, so it created a search engine specifically for finding news and commentary on blogs. The Google Blog Search is available at both Blogger (http://blogsearch.google.com) and Google (http://blogsearch.google.com), but both faces use the same index in the background.

Instead of searching the open Web for content, the Google Blog Search finds content in XML news feeds. Because of this, any blogs that don't also publish a news feed are not included in the Google Blog Search index. Also, Google started collecting content for the index when it launched in late 2005, so the index goes much further back in time.

It's also important to note that the Google Blog Search results in page returns that Google feels are the best matches for a particular query. But timeliness is a key aspect of blogs and could be to your search as well. Click Sort by date at the top of the results page to see search results listed from newest to oldestlike a blog!

Google Blog Search Syntax

Use Google Blog Search just as you would Google News Search. You can use the standard Google search syntaxes such as site: or intitle: to refine your searches. There are also a few special search syntaxes unique to Blog Search:

blogurl:

This searches a specific blog by including its URL, like this:

blogurl:radar.oreilly.com google

inblogtitle:

As you'd expect, this limits a search to blogs with the specified word in its title:

inblogtitle:ipod battery

This example searches for the word "battery" among blogs with the word "ipod" in their title.

inposttitle:

Searching in post titles can be useful when you want to narrow your search to specific topics. Post titles often include keywords related to the content of a post:

inposttitle:ipod iTunes video

inpostauthor:

This filters posts by an author name, which can be handy if you know who wrote something but can't remember where you read it:

author:paul hacks

This query finds posts that use the word "hacks" by people named Paul. Keep in mind that not every blog publishes author information along with each post, so the results are limited to just those blogs with author info.

You can always skip the special syntax and head over to the Blog Search Advanced Search page (http://search.blogger.com/advanced_blog_search) to perform these and other specialized searches such as finding posts within a date range.