Every week in order to compile the Letters and Blogs, I turn to two blog search engines - presently Technorati and Google Blog Search - to see who has been writing things (nice or nasty, hey, we don't care, it's all conversation, right?) about what we've been writing about.
I won't bore you with the details (which involves using curl to download the page with the weekly Technology section links, stripping the links to the stories, storing them on a MySQL database on my machine, then recovering them and parsing them to feed to the search engines - hang on, was that detail?). But I think I need some new suggestions for which other blog search engine - or engines - to use.
Technorati seems to give a fair spread of results, and isn't too badly polluted with splogs.
For example, here's the generic search for Technology stories from the Guardian on November 1, which includes those from the paper, web-only, and the print section. It says there are 59 results at present. (Quite a few of those are splogs, but they're easy to recognise.)
Google Blog Search though seems to me hopeless. It often gives zero results, when I know there's more than that happening. (Here's the same search as that above for Technology on Nov 1: 2 - count them two - results. That's rubbish. Google Blog Search did have a problem in which it would show you every splog in the world, but now seems to have gone from letting every splog in, to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.)
I'm considering IceRocket, which seems to give results that even Technorati misses. (Here's the comparative search: 23 results.) The ideal would be two search engines whose results cover the lot, while ignoring all the splogs out there.
So: do you use blog search engines? Do you recommend any? Which would you suggest, o crowdsourcerors?
