Google Hacks

Finding Weblog Commentary

Building queries to search only recent commentary appearing in weblogs.

Time was when you needed to find current commentary, you didn’t turn to a full-text search engine like Google. You searched Usenet, combed mailing lists, or searched through current news sites like CNN.com and hoped for the best.

But as search engines have evolved, they’ve been able to index pages more quickly than once every few weeks. In fact, Google tunes its engine to more readily index sites with a high information churn rate. At the same time, a phenomenon called the weblog (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/essblogging/) has arisen, an online site keeps a running commentary and associated links, updated daily—and indeed, even more often in many cases. Google indexes many of these sites on an accelerated schedule. If you know how to find them, you can build a query that searches just these sites for recent commentary.

Finding weblogs

When weblogs first appeared on the Internet, they were generally updated manually or by using homemade programs. Thus, there were no standard words you could add to a search engine to find them. Now, however, many weblogs are created using either specialized software packages (like Movable Type, http://www.movabletype.org/, or Radio Userland, http://radio.userland.com/) or as web services (like Blogger, http://www.blogger.com/). These programs and services are more easily found online with some clever use of special syntaxes [Section 1.5] or magic words. ...