October 28, 2006

LISZEN: Coolest. Thing. Ever.

Okay, maybe not ever, but still plenty cool. Garrett Hungerford has used the brand new Google Co-op Customizable Search Engine feature to create a search engine just for library blogs. It's called LISZEN and is well worth fiddling around with.

Using listings such as at LISWiki, he's compiled a list of over 500 blogs to search. You can even suggest new blogs for the engine to pick up.

Interestingly, it's a rather modest search engine, as it has not picked up any discussion on itself yet. As of right now, if you do a search on "liszen" you will get no hits (for some reason, I can't create a link to the search results page in the engine, perhaps a bug with Google CSE?). Compare that with 16 hits on Google Blog Search. I wonder how long the Google CSE database is out-of-sync with what should be more-or-less the same info in Google Blog Search? via LISNews.

It would be great if other communities out there were able to create their own blog search engines -- science blogs for example would be a great idea for an engine, but there must be way more than 500 science blogs out there.

2 comments:

Curious Cat said...

We have created the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Search which includes blogs and other sites. It is possible to limit your search to just blogs by using the tag filter. Suggestions are welcome.

John Dupuis said...

Thanks, CuriousCat, I'll certainly take a look at your search engine!