Phil Bradley's weblog

Lijit search - your own search engine

There are lots of custom search engines around - Rollyo, Google Custom Search and so on, but the Lijit search is designed to take all your created content from your blog, website, Flickr account, twitter and so on and create a single resource for you. It seems very simple and straight forward - although given that it's quite late at night I'm taking a chance on creating, configuring and then posting about it. However, here it is:

Lijit Search

HotStuff 2.0 - Librarian weblogs

Dave Pattern the Library Systems Manager, University of Huddersfield has recently created the HotStuff resource. This is a collection of feeds from almost 1,000 library related blogs, which are collated on a daily basis to discover new and or interesting topics. He's also added in a 'hot or not' page. The word of the day for January 6th is 'potato', surprisingly enough. (Think couch potato)

Really fun resource and a great way to discover new blogs to follow.

Loaded Web blog directory

If you're fed up using more traditional weblog search engines such as Google Blog search, Technorati or Icerocket, AND if you're American/Canadian AND you're interested in geo-centric searching, try Loaded Web  instead. It's still in its early stages yet - there are 799 blogs listed in 450 different (US) cities. Searchers can also go into the Local Business Directory by state and then search by city. Once you're in the city section you can then search by business.

They make the point, and I quote here 'Blogs are displayed in completely random order!' - this in the Blogs in Richmond section. I think this is fine if you have a small collection, but they're going to need to ramp up quite quickly to add a proper search function - which they could actually do now with a custom search engine.

Very specialised and niche at the moment. Doubtless they'll let me know when they broaden it out and they do have an option to add your own blog as well.

Weblog: Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century

Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century. No, I am NOT making this up. It is there, complete with pictures.

Twitter for teachers

If you're a teacher and are using, or thinking of starting to use Twitter you might find this resource useful - twitter4teachers  - it's a PBwiki listing teachers of different subjects, grades and countries who use the microblogging resource.

Techcrunch helps nail the lid on Bloglines.

Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader. This is the title of a post from TechCrunch which makes for damming reading. Mark Fletcher, who sold Bloglines to Ask in 2005 said in Twitter that he was considering going to Google Reader.

I've mentioned my dissatisfaction with Bloglines a few times, and I know that several of my readers and colleagues are similarly fed up with it, or have already moved across to Google Reader, and I've done the same thing. I think this is just symptomatic of the way that Ask is falling to pieces - they've dumbed down the web interface, made it more difficult to use, and given us less flexibility in the latest incarnation. The writing was of course on the wall when they dumped Gary Price earlier this year along with other key employees. Their position in the top 4 search engines is now looking very fragile indeed, and I don't really regard them as being a credible resource any longer.

βloglines continues to decline

βloglines is unfortunately continuing what appears to be a rather sad decline. Two of the people that I follow on Twitter have expressed considerable irritation that it's not updating properly. Bloglines made a couple of very unfortunate changes to the beta interface recently - it was very difficult to tell the difference between read and unread posts, and links to the original postings were not working. While the link issue has been addressed it's still very hard to see the difference between two close shades of grey. I gave it a couple of weeks and then I walked away out of frustration, and it looks as though more people are doing the same.

I did a quick check to see what people were saying in their blogs and sample comments are
"lately there have been more and more problems, and the past two days, it's been completely dead slow".
"Bloglines just frustrates me."
"Bloglines has been having some serious problems. Often I’ll open it up and none of my feeds in the left sidebar will show. I’ve contacted Bloglines about this but haven’t received a response."

Up until now I've used Bloglines when I've been teaching RSS and encouraged people to use their service, but I'm seriously thinking of calling time on it completely. It'll be a shame, because I've really enjoyed using it over the years and have found it elegant and fun to use, but if it can't do the job it's a hinderence, not a help.

Iterend Blog Search Engine

Iterend Blog Search Engine. This is still in beta, but you can get immediate access via giving them an email address. First signs look good - it has advanced search (though just a basic advanced search if that makes sense) and a help page! Major points for that then. You can search on a single word or a phrase, Boolean operators and what they call 'category' searches which map to Wikipedia. URL searches work and there's a related search option as well.

The start page is a little crowded when you first look at it - two major panes, with latest phrases (or categories) on the left pushing out the latest news over on the right. Once you've done a search though results even themselves up neatly. Users can limit searches to a time period (hour, 12, 24 hours, week, month, anytime) in sentences or posts. Results can be filtered by relevance, date or cluster size, and RSS feeds are available.

So far, so good - I like the variety and it's well thought out. As far as the actual results go though it's not quite up to scratch yet - a search for "phil bradley" over at Google blogsearch resulted in almost 3,000 references while iterend gave me 17. A search for obama gave almost 8 million compared to 52,000 and credit crunch returned 385,000 over 1544 results. However, this is early days yet, and iterend is still getting to grips with indexing blogs. While there's not a great deal there yet this could be a useful engine in the longer term, and worth keeping an eye on.

Phil Bradley: Search Blogger of the Day

Phil Bradley: Search Blogger of the Day | SEO Scoop. Gosh, that's very nice of you.

SoftRatty weblog search engine

SoftRatty. Well, it's a search engine. Seems to have a fairly small database at the moment, but it's clear, easy to use, provides RSS feeds and so on. Might be worth keeping in reserve if some of the other big ones like Google Blogsearch or Technorati go down.