Blog Searching Tips

Tara Calishan of ResearchBuzz recently spoke at Web Search University about blog searching. After her presentation, she gained a tip from the folks at Google about using Google blog search. Her conversation with one Google engineer went like this:


"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.

Interesting! Read the entire article here.