Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 136

this should look rather familiar; a lot of Google's Web search technology
transfers to the blog search. However, this doesn't mean that you should
use the blog search the same way you use a Web search. URL searches, for
example, aren't going to be very useful. Instead, try narrowing your query
by limiting words to a blog post's title, or by the language of the blog.

hints
n

google's blog search, for some reason, defaults to providing
results in order of relevance. Use the link on the right side of
the page to get the results by date.

n

Use the “references” link with each search result to see other
blog posts that link to the one in the search result.

Trapping
Google's blog search makes trapping easy. At the bottom of each search
result page are four links. Two are for getting the results as an Atom feed
(10 or 100 results) and two of them are for getting the results as an RSS feed
(again, 10 or 100 results). I recommend you stick with the ten results. If
you've generated a search that provides 100 results at a time, your query is
probably not narrow enough!

Possibilities
If you've used Google for any length of time, the syntax of Google's blog
search will be very familiar to you. Take advantage of that and go for build-
ing more complex queries.

sphere
Sphere (sphere.com) is a newer blog search that's got a very nice set of
search results.

Building your queries
At irst blush, Sphere doesn't seem to have much in the line of special syn-
tax, but if you check out the Hint page at sphere.com/tips, you'll see a vari-
ety of available syntax, including page title, blog names, and domain name
( Figure 7.16 ).