It’s been announced on the Blogger blog that there’s a new way to browse for Blogger content. Now, when you go to a Blogger blog’s profile page, you can click on one of the elements of the profile page and browse all other profiles that also contain that same element.

For example, say we’re looking at the profile page for the Alaska State Historical Collections Mystery Photos, located at http://www.blogger.com/profile/11205033399138363188. The location of the profile has been filled out, as has the industry. If you click on Juneau link and you’ll get a list of all the Blogger profiles (390 at this writing) that are located in Juneau.

(Note that these profiles are the product of the bloggers themselves and there doesn’t appear to be any oversight. I browsed some profiles where some of the words were innocuous but the resulting listings were absolutely not safe for work. Be warned.)

The keywords/locations for which you’re searching show up in the result URL– for example, finding Blogger profiles that include an interest in tennis has an URL that looks like this: http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=i&q=tennis . I tried to add other interests to the search to find multiple interests at the same time (finding someone interested in tennis AND golf, for example) but that doesn’t appear to work.

If you want to find multiple interests, or people in a certain location that are interested in certain things, use Google. So say I’m looking for people in Texas who are interested in dancing. Notice that the profile pages include a Location: space and an Interests space. I can do the following search that takes advantage of the profile page patterns:

site:blogger.com “location * texas” “interests * dancing”

The asterisks are for full-word wildcards in the locations and interests patterns. In this case you’ll get four results.

Of course, if you just one to browse one aspects of a Blogger profile, do the browsing right from the Blogger site. The Google search is good because it allows searching across multiple parameters, but there’s no guarantee that Google has indexed all the profiles…

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