Question: Are there search engines that are good at finding Weblogs on a particular topic, or in our neighborhood? Where do we find advice on increasing traffic to our web site thanks to search engines finding our content?
Answer: Check out
Scott Johnson's Becoming Part of the Weblogging Community which outlines Community Resources, with brief introductions to their functions and how we can participate. Also check out his Etiquette on pages 8-9. Just as there is a word Netiquette for e-Etiquette, is there a word for Blogging Etiquette?
- Weblogs.com
- Recently updated - includes Radio and Manila sites.
- News is free.com
- The blogging world includes people writing new content, and commenting on what others have written. News is free.com helps us find interesting stuff to comment on. You can also add your Weblog to their input.
- Day Pop.com
- Search Engine of Weblogs. Search for your own name and see who has commented on you. This is not the same as referrers, limited to posts in the last 24 hours.
- MIT Blog dex
- This indexes the information to which Blogs are linking.
- Meerkat
- You can select types of news you want to follow.
- Garbox
- Show you all sites that have linked to a particular weblog entry or news item.
- Syndic8
- Alternative to News is free
Go to Scott's Info to get the actual urls of these places, reviews in more detail than my outline, and step by step how to participate in them. Scott's [Fuzzy Blog] recently admired www.blogstreet.com which has 9,700 blogs there when I checked.
Answer: Check out Al Macintyre's:
- July 10 post on top UK Weblogs thanks to specific services.
- July 12 post on BlogChalking, which I do not exactly figure out.
- Aug 12 post on MSNBC and Eaton Web, both organizing Weblogs by subject.
- Aug 14 I try to register my weblog at Eatonweb and relay my struggles getting that done.
Al has often mentioned [Search Day] as a great source for information about Search Engines in general. For example [Aug 22 Search Day] surveys why some perfectly good web sites fail to provide a search engine to improve user navigation. In my case it is merely that there are many things I plan to do some day & this is one of those I have procrastinated with, and I want to use it for myself. But I also want to learn what's involved in making a site Search Engine-Friendly. QUOTE
More than 1,600 webmasters responded to the survey, which covered the topics of why site managers have or have not installed search engines, correlations of the sizes of sites and the installation of search engines, frequency of updates, file formats served, languages, and number of languages used on sites. Also see [Search Engine Ratings] of the 16 most popular search tools.
-
Most sites with a search tool installed wanted to provide better
navigation and a professional look for the site.
-
Sites with more pages tend to have search engines installed.
-
Sites which are updated hourly or daily are much more likely to have
search installed than those which update less frequently. -
Sites with non-English text are more likely to have search engines
installed.
Why haven't the majority of web managers surveyed installed search
engines? Time and [complexity] were the most frequently cited reasons. UNQUOTE.
[IT Analysis Com] reports that the US Gov FTC questions Search Engine integrity with respect to disclosing paid links.
From Search Day I have found out about some Directory based search engines, where we start with the general flavor of site we want then drill down from there, such as
- [1DO3.com] in the UK has a section just on Weblogs covering current events.
- [Speciality Search Engines] has links to
- [Invisible Web] where normal search engines cannot go
- [Web Rings] where a cluster of sites are interlinked on topics of mutual interest, such as a Science Fiction Fan Club. I think there are a lot more out there than this outfit has indexed.
- Search Engines designed for usage through Wireless.
- [Miscelaneous Other] such as discussion groups, job postings, literature, museums and art works, transportation
- Search Day newsletter subscribe from http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/
- Dig into Search Day archives. July 11 they had a big article with connections to 131 different legitimate ways to improve traffic to your web site, by ensuring that search engines will include you properly. There's also a bit here on the e-etiquette of linking to other sites, irrespective of whether they are weblogs.
- Remind Al ... 2 do includes getting into the gems = Al's notes on Traffic to Web Site ideas for increasing.
I mentioned a Radio Wish to one of my Radio correspondents, who said that it sounded like I was talking about [Mind Mapping] which intriqued me, but I still have that Radio Dream:
Many search engines give us the choice of searching the whole internet, just that one site, or just the sites run by a particular company. I want a sub-category to be a group of people who have created Radio Userland documentation, in which we can adjust the list of sites involved, perhaps have new ones and url changes communicated to us via News Aggregation. I also want a system of aliases, in which some feature might be known by different names to people familiar with different kinds of Weblogging software vendors, or may be commonly confused with some similarly appearing interface with other Computer software.
So we search for topic X and we also get links to Y and Z because of aliases, and we get hits where they exist on any one of the group of sites where people have done documentation. But I want more, a directory of Radio features, with who has documented that, so it becomes obvious on which features no one has yet documented.
This concept could also be applied to other special interests ... we compile a directory of sites that are involved in a particular category of particular interest to us, then do a search vs. all of them at the same time.
This post was originally written for Al's new category [e-Radio Ideas = Empower Freedom of e-Speech through dws.Radio.FAQ learning in Radio Userland: Questions; Wishes; Tips; Speculation] but then as it developed, Al thought also applied to the Home Page.
1:41:19 AM 
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