#3 Blogging 2 (week 2 task)

So, I explored the different blog search engines to see if I could find out what people thought of Self Check Machines. My personal topic of interest was to see if anyone was gossiping about either of my siblings (probably hard to catch since most people wouldn't use a first and last name in a blog). Here are my stream of consciousness thoughts on the search engines.....

Technorati.
Ha! Should be called Technocrappy. I couldn't find anything.

BlogScope:
I really like the "hot keywords" feature... it's interesting to see what other people are searching. At first I was impressed with the color-coded graphs.... but it started to feel a little overwhelming. If you're like most people you want instant results and you don't want to think about them. I know that sounds horrible, but come on you know it's true. If you're doing an in-depth search, these features may be helpful but the negative skews, popularity curves, time restrictions, etc. made me feel like I was back in Stats class.

Sphere
I really like this search engine. The first thing I noticed was the large search menu at the top of the screen with bold, large text. VERY user friendly. I also liked the fact you could sort your results by relevance or date and that you could choose a time range of posted blogs to search.

Blog.ask.com
I must admit, I've been a little wary of ask.com ever since they killed Jeeves. I really liked that guy. ... but after searching I was reintroduced to the best feature of ask.com: the binocular function. It is incredibly helpful to have a little preview of potential pages of interest--especially when looking for a blog. The other search engines did show the first few sentences of the blog results but the binocular feature allows you to read more than that to make sure the post is about your topic.


.....oh and no one has said anything bad about my brother or sister.