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.