A Consuming Experience

Blogging, internet, software, mobile, telecomms, gadgets, technology, media and digital rights from the perspective of a consumer / user, including reviews, rants and random thoughts. Aimed at intelligent non-geeks, who are all too often unnecessarily disenfranchised by excessive use of tech jargon, this blog aims to be informative and practical without being patronising. With guides, tutorials, tips - and the occasional ever so slightly naughty observation.

Add this blog to Del.icio.us, Digg or Furl | Create Watchlist for this blog

Add this blog to my Technorati Favorites!

How to search Blogger profiles

Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Deutsch | Español | Français | Italiano | Português | 日本語 | 한국어 | 汉语

Add this post to Del.icio.us, Digg or Furl | Create Watchlist




[Edit: I've now included a search form to do this - see the bottom of the sidebar of this blog (scroll down a bit); the Javascript code which you can add to your own template plus another usable search form is in this blog entry. Enjoy!]

The Blogger Help page says you can't yet search the profiles of fellow Blogger.com bloggers, but I discovered when tinkering with my own profile that you can do that, after a fashion.

At the moment you click on links in a profile, e.g. against an interest listed in your profile, to search for people with that interest mentioned in their profiles.

However, I've noticed the structure of the URL in the address bar for the search results page follows a certain pattern, and you can use that to search for certain words in the Interests, Movies, Musics or Books parts of Blogger profiles, even if those words don't appear in your own profile.

To do this, enter or paste this search string in your browser address bar, substituting as mentioned below:
http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=i&q=vocal+music
"=i" searches within the Interests section of a profile, so instead of "=i" use
=m to search within movies
=s for music
=b for books
and instead of "vocal+music", after "q=" just type in your own search words with "+" between them, and that's all.

The above example searches the Interests section of profiles for "vocal music".

Another example (I've made this one clickable for convenience): to search for profiles with the word "Shawshank" in the "Movies" section, put in the address bar:
http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=m&q=shawshank

Works for me! Only thing is it doesn't show how many hits there are (but neither does the "search by clicking" method), so you may be for a long surf if you try certain popular words.

You'd be surprised how many people there are who are interested in... ahem well no, then again, maybe you wouldn't...



Links to this post on:

  • Icerocket -
  • Blogpulse
  • Bloglines
  • Delicious
  • Google Blog Search -

Create link here by posting on Blogger



3 Comment(s):

Here's the syntax for searching profiles by by location. You can leave off loc2, or loc2 and loc1, if you like.

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=l&loc0=US&loc1=Oklahoma&loc2=Tulsa

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=l&loc0=US&loc1=Oklahoma

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=l&loc0=US

(By MichaelBates, at Thursday, December 08, 2005 9:36:00 PM)  Edit Comment

Thanks Michael! I shall add that to the form ASAP.

(By Improbulus, at Friday, December 09, 2005 8:39:00 AM)  Edit Comment

Have produced a search form and blogged about it now, see this post.

Unfortunately I've only been able to get it to work for the USA...

(By Improbulus, at Sunday, January 01, 2006 8:23:00 PM)  Edit Comment

Post a Comment | | Subscribe to all comments on all posts


| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »
| Previous Post »