Oh, well. No time like the present. So back to business.
I spent a couple of lunch breaks last week exploring Technorati and some time this morning on Google Blog Search, comparing features, ease of use, relevance of search results, etc.
My search term was bengal cats. This is a fairly new breed of domestic housecat that is becoming very popular because of the beauty of their exotic markings, which may resemble those of a cheetah, a jaguar, a snow leopard, or an ocelot.
Due to their growing popularity and inherently photogenic nature, I thought there would be a million blogs from which to choose. But not so. I did find some good ones (NOTE: define good as interesting to me) but not nearly as many as I'd have thought.
I have to say I found Google Blog Search infinitely easier to use than Technorati. Technorati seems to be universally praised as among the most used and useful blog search tools, and I'm sure it is, but I found it not as transparent as I would have liked.
It appears to have been thoughtfully put together, with a plethora of features, the value of many of which I'm sure will become apparent to me in time. I will definitely be back to explore Technorati further. It just wasn't giving me the number of useful search hits I was expecting.
With a general search, the search term bengal cats returned nearly 800 hits, mostly blogposts that mentioned a bengal cat somewhere in the text rather than a blog devoted to the subject of bengal cats. I sampled a few of them, but this was too large a pool.
I did a bit better with Technorati's advanced search when I entered my search phase into the find posts tagged field. I got less than 70 hits--few enough to actually browse through.
I liked the videos that popped up. There are a couple of hilarious ones featuring bengals vying for an exercise wheel: "Bengal Cats Fighting for the Exercise Wheel" and "3 Bengal Cats on Exercise Wheel." I could watch those all day. (I could also have found those simply by going to YouTube.)
I did come across one useful blog which also publishes a magazine called Bengals Illustrated. (They claim to have a swimsuit issue.) Basically eye candy for bengal buffs.
My cavil is that I came across this one indirectly, in a link on one of the not-so-useful blog sites I visited. The Bengals Illustrated blog did not come up on Technorati on its own. Disappointing, as this was the most relevant site I found using this search engine.
Actually, besides the magazine and the exercise wheel videos, the two most worthwhile posts I encountered on Technorati were one entitled "Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths," where a bengal cat is mentioned as the hapless victim of a neighbor's hyper-aggressive nonbengal cat) and another in which the blogger (Michael M) concludes that there is a 78% chance that his cats are plotting to kill him.
While funny, everything except the Bengals Illustrated blog were not exactly on topic. Worse, they took a lot of digging to find.
Thank heavens I tried Google Blog Search next. It was reassuringly simple to use and, for the bengal cats search at least, yielded more useful results more quickly. Four relevant blogs popped up on the first page of search results. Subsequent pages of search results were not as helpful as the first, but at least I got usable results fast. For a beginner like me, that's important.
I think for now I'll probably turn to Google Blog Search for quick-and-dirty results and try Technorati when I need something more highly refined. Quick forays into Blogpulse, Bloglines, and Ice Rocket yielded no useful results. I look forward to exploring these further and trying out some of the other Blog Search Engines, but I feel I've spent enough time on Thing #3 and must forge ahead to Thing #4.
Enough said!
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