Chapter 6. Searching Blogs and Blog Postings

If you've been on the Internet for any length of time, you're probably familiar with message boards, discussion groups, and Usenet newsgroups, all of which let users post and respond to messages in organized threads. You're probably also familiar with the concept of blogging, which is one of those new phenomena that's caught on so quickly that it already feels like it's been around forever. A blogshort for "web log"is like a message board, but a little more owner-driven.

The typical blog is a personal website that is updated frequently with commentary, links to other sites, and anything else the author might be interested in. Many blogs also let visitors post their own comments in response to the owners postings, resulting in a community that is very similar to that of a message board. It's a 21st century version of self-publishing, enabled by the Internet.

If you want to start your own blog, Google offers its own blog-hosting service called Blogger; we'll discuss Blogger in more depth in Chapter 23, "Using Blogger." But if all you want to do is read blog postings, there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs you can choose from, covering just about any topic you can think of. How do you find the blog that contains the information and opinions you're interested in?

Once again, Google comes to the rescue. When you want to find a particular blog or blog posting, you can use Google Blog Search. This is a specialized subset of the main Google search engine, fine-tuned to search the far-reaching blogosphere. Read on to learn more.