So apparently Google Blog Search is the most popular blog search engine. Considering how much blog spam I’ve found on there, this is IMHO less a victory for Google than an indictment of blog search engines in general (and it makes me nostalgic for Feedster.) Personally I still find Technorati very usable, though I do find that I’m using Google Blog Search more and more (the magical search modifier when using Google Blog Search is -inurl:blogspot . It helps weed out the splogs.)

I have not found the perfect blog search engine. I haven’t even found the one that makes me really happy. Many of them are too cluttered with spam. But I have found a couple that I like a whole lot and I’d recommend. The first one is Icerocket Blog Search at http://www.icerocket.com/ . It uses date headers to separate search results so it’s easy to get a sense of time by just glancing a results page. It also offers a trending tool and a high signal/spam ratio.

The other blog search engine I like doesn’t get a lot of press; it’s called Blogdigger ( http://www.blogdigger.com/index.html ). The number of blogs it indexes is on the small side, but on the other hand I’ve seen very few spam blogs here. Blogdigger also uses date headers, like Icerocket, and additionally appears to be indexing either del.icio.us feeds or bookmarks from certain users. Either way you’ll find Del.icio.us entries in the search results along with their tags. Very cool.

Instead of trying to kill Google, how about some of those hot new second web wave companies out there make a decent blog search engine? All submissions reviewed by a human, spam filtering in the search results, all blogs flaggable (so the splogs that do slip through can be caught by visitors and removed by site wranglers), a tagging system, integration with public information resources like Wikipedia, and partnerships with other sites that distribute and aggregate information (RSSFwd for starters).

And a partridge in a pear tree.