Thing 3 - Blog Search Tools

I explored Technorati and Google Blog Search. I’ve always been interested in raising bats, but when Mom was alive, she wouldn’t hear of it. Now that she’s “out of the picture,” I think it’s time for me to start living.

Anyway, I tried the search “raising bats” in both search engines. Technorati returned 586 hits and Google returned 25,376. When I re-searched using the “advanced” feature and on the exact phrase, Technorati returned two hits, Google returned eight (nine when I turned “safe search” off).

Neither of the two Technorati results was helpful, but one did take me to an interesting blog, Journal of a Marginalized White Male, that described a fight between neighbors Ozzie Ozbourne and Alice Cooper over some bats that Alice was raising in his backyard. I think the account might have been fictional.

The nine Google results weren’t much help either in my quest to learn more about raising bats. One blog contained a thread about washing bats in a washing machine. I just couldn’t follow the instructions. “Kairunlove” had a bat in her house, but chose not to make her profile available to me. “Harrington” owns three bats as pets. That's all he would share, except that his current mood is horny.

Several of the Google results were about raising baseball bats, which I have no interest in.

Comparing the two sites, I preferred the added features of Technorati such as the “Top 100 Blogs,” the blog directory, and “favorites.” Google invited me to create an email alert, add a blog search gadget, and subscribe to a blog search feed for “raising bats,” but somehow I felt I was going to be disappointed.

Ann Smarty (do you think that’s her real name?), in the Search Engine Journal blog, finds higher relevance and more useful results using Google Blog Search than using Technorati. While I got more result from Google, neither search engine gave me what I was looking for: a vibrant community of bat raising bloggers willing to share with me the highs and lows of their unique hobby.
Your friend ferd