The Life of a Sentient Search Engine

For our latest “Learn & Play” assignment. We were supposed to play around more with feeds and learn about tools for searching for them. I’m an old hand at the feed subscribing process, so I won’t burden you all with my experiences subscribing to “my favorite sites”. Instead, I will concentrate on the blog searches I used.

Bloglines Searchwas okay. That’s all. Just okay. I really didn’t care for the layout or the “in your face” nature of the ads. I did successfully find a few blogs this way, but I quickly grew tired of the whole thing.

Topix.net was also just okay. Nothing here was of much interest.

Sundic8.com was really helpful. Yes, as others have noted, its ugly, but I thought it was effective (some of the most effective tools out there are ugly). The additional info provided about the feed proved helpful in some instances.

Technorati was interesting. The first time I tried to use it I just found it confusing. After going back a second time I saw the real advantages. The trick is to be searching for the right thing (don’t tell it to search posts when you want blogs about a topic). Once you get you head on straight in this way, its plain to see why these guys are the big name. Nice screen layout and tons of info about the blog is available before you even view the blog itself. I love that it provides a feed from the blog so you can get an idea of the tone and focus of the blog. Give Technorati enough time and you won’t be disappointed.