Thing 3: Blog Search Engines

As far as I'm concerned, Google Blog Search beat the others hands down in regard to finding relevant information. It was the most user friendly, and had the best relevance compared to Technorati or Sphere. The "Search" window was easy to find, and when I searched "choosing a dog", the results were far more relevant with Google than Technorati or Sphere; in fact, for this particular topic, Technorati had only one relevant hit, even if of dubious authority. However, many of the Google hits were not actually blogs, making it useful for finding relevant information, but not neccessarily relevant blogs. I guess this would vary depending on the topic searched and the terminology used, but I had similar results with searching a more general topic (travel). I liked the way Google had popular recent blogs on the home page, and I also liked the organization as well as the relevance of the results of my search. Like Amazon, it also had related topics that were useful and interesting. I couldn't even figure out how to search in Sphere(!), and although the directory was interesting and helpful in Technorati, the scope of topics browsed was pretty limited compared to Google, and there were no appropriately related topics-in fact, some of the topics weren't even vaguely related to my query. As good as Google is for searching relevant information, though, it may not be especially effective for searching blogs. But considering how seldom I would be inclined to search for blogs beyond those of people I know and would actually be interested in following, I don't think for my purposes a blog search engine would be a particularly useful tool.