How to search Blogger.com

Thursday, June 02, 2005

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[Edited 2 January 2006 to add searches by geographical location and general profile searches. Now works in New Blogger aka Blogger Beta, too.]

How you search Blogger depends on what you want to search for, but I'll cover different ways of searching Blogger.com as I've noticed people recently arriving at my blog who clearly want to know how!

Blogger help

To search the official Blogger help articles, go to this page or use this box (not case sensitive and it seems to ignore <, > and $ symbols but otherwise it searches whole words only) - results open in a new window:

How to find Blogger members by interests, movies, music, books, (updated Aug 07:) industry, occupation

To search the profiles of Blogger members to find Blogger users who have a particular interest or like particular movies, musics or books or (updated Aug 07) works in a particular industry or has a particular occupation, try this post (which also gives code you can insert in your own blog or webpage for the search form), or use the search form below (opens in a new window).

Note that I don't know how Blogger have chosen to order the results, and don't forget that though it says Results 1-10 on the results page there could be more than 10 results so keep hitting that Continue button if you want to see more results.

How to search for Blogger.com members by geographical location

Use the form below to find Blogger.com bloggers living near you, or Blogger users from another particular geographical place (with thanks to Michael Bates for the syntax and KRS/Truckspy/redryder52 for sussing out that they use standard international country codes and providing the code for the full list!).

Note again as above that there could be more than 10 results, and also note that:

Country and state, province or city is essential to find a town - you have to enter both country and state/province/city for it to work, you just can't enter a town without entering the state too (though you can enter just the state etc without a town, or the country without a state or province etc)
No abbreviations - you have to enter the full name of the state or town, no abbreviations (e.g. Ca won't find anything, you need California).

Find Blogger.com members - anywhere! (results open in a new window)

in this State, Province etc OR City

in this town (optional):

How to find Blogger.com bloggers by name, and search their profiles

To search for a particular Blogger member by their username, or just to search within Blogger members' profiles for a combination of things e.g. someone with particular interests in a particular location, use the form below (but bear in mind it only searches profiles which have been indexed on Google, and "London" can find someone named "London" as well as people living in London, so if you want something specific use one of the other forms - unfortunately you can't combine a specific location search with a specific interests etc search, the only way to search both is to use this form with the one issue I mentioned):

How to search blogs which use Blogger/Blogspot

To search the content of blogs which use Blogger, i.e. the text of blog posts, at least where they are hosted on Blogger's associated Blogspot.com (not all Blogger blogs are), search on Google against site:blogspot.com (i.e. type in your search term then type "site:blogspot.com" in the Google search box) or use this form; again results open in a new window:

(Note though that this only searches blogs which Google has indexed; it doesn't search all Blogspot blogs unfortunately, as Google doesn't crawl them all, and furthermore it won't search Blogger blogs which are hosted elsewhere than on Blogspot and whose name therefore don't end in "blogspot.com". Technorati do have much better coverage of blogs but sadly you can't yet search for words from particular domains or subdomains on Technorati.)

Or you can now search Blogger blogs via Google's Blog Search, which crawls more blogs than the main Google service:

Technorati Tags: blog, blogs, blogging, Blogger, Blogger.com, search, searching, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience

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21 Comment(s):

As always, a very useful post.

(By SatishTalim, at 02 June, 2005 03:33) Edit Comment

Did you miss me did you miss me :)
Hehe..

Dang as RR would say, I forgot my Blogger password. But you know where I live :)

I like these things, searching Blogger is a pain, especially for stuff you really want. Good your making life simple!

(By tabitha, at 03 June, 2005 20:06) Edit Comment

Thank you both for your comments and encouragement!

Tab, yep, you got my email?

(By Improbulus, at 04 June, 2005 18:54) Edit Comment

An extremely useful post!

(By ram_einstein, at 30 July, 2005 14:57) Edit Comment

Thanks for your comment ram_einstein, glad you found it helpful!

(By Improbulus, at 07 August, 2005 22:18) Edit Comment

Hi

This is a really useful post - Thanks!!

I've recently come across blogpulse.com which claims to be a search engine for blogs (amongst other things). Anyone had any experience with it? Is it any good?

(By Alison, at 29 August, 2005 11:37) Edit Comment

Thanks Alison!

Yes I use Blogpulse occasionally, it does pick up some things which you can't find on Technorati. None of the blog search engines seems fully comprehensive, it's a question of using a combo really. Blogpulse certainly has good help pages though.

(By Improbulus, at 30 August, 2005 13:32) Edit Comment

Great job indeed!
Yours was the first search listing on Google!

(By Suresh Panicker, at 28 August, 2006 13:04) Edit Comment

Thanks Suresh!

(By Improbulus, at 31 August, 2006 09:15) Edit Comment

Any thoughts on why searching blog profiles is limited? Searching for Location=Country and Interest=Hobby would be a useful way of finding people nearby with similar interests. Is this because blogs don't want to commit search power in this way or because they want to protect people?

(By Clarence, at 14 October, 2006 17:27) Edit Comment

Sorry, no idea Clarence, but hopefully with Beta they'll be improving the profile searching.

(By Improbulus, at 11 December, 2006 20:42) Edit Comment

Any chance you get write a script to search on the email link of the profile page? If you roll-over it, it displays the email address, but how do you find blogs associated with a particular email?

(By Anonymous, at 26 January, 2007 15:57) Edit Comment

Anon, sorry but I don't think you can do that. Except maybe by searching the full email address e.g. on Google, that might come up with something? Many people do munge their email address so it's not easily found or usable in an automated way. Try Google, but it may well not work.

(By Improbulus, at 27 January, 2007 19:51) Edit Comment

I was looking how to search Blogger Bloggers in West Country counties and this page came up which is ideal.

Well done ... great job.

Looking at the results of my searches for blogger blogs in Devon and Cornwall, it seems to me that they are in order of latest posting ie. the most recently posted at top.

This is ideal for me because I'm looking for active Blogger blogs not ones that have stopped.

Thanks again.

(By Rob Hopcott, at 25 February, 2008 15:52) Edit Comment

Thank you for posting these helpful tips. I'm still new with the site and thankfully I was able to manage locating profiles from my hometown with your help.

(By Raena, at 29 February, 2008 00:11) Edit Comment

Hello. Great tips here!
But. . . .. Do u think there's a search where by we can use Email?
Tht way it would be easyyyy~
Pretty pls someone?? =(

(By Anonymous, at 19 March, 2008 17:32) Edit Comment

Rob & Raena, with apologies for the delay, thanks for the feedback - I really appreciate it.

Anon - I don't know what you mean by search using email, if you can elaborate I'll try to help.

(By Improbulus, at 08 April, 2008 22:59) Edit Comment

Could you combine search elements?

I would like to search by occupation, interests, and geography in one combined search. If I click on a blog profile page and see that someone is a musician, that's great, but following the thread of other musicians gets me everyone in the world, not just my hometown.

(By Anonymous, at 06 October, 2008 16:11) Edit Comment

Great reference page! I use it all the time to find like-minded people. Thanks for this!

(By RichardJ1985, at 25 November, 2008 18:08) Edit Comment

Thanx buddy!

(By Anonymous, at 29 January, 2009 19:06) Edit Comment

is there a way to find a blog that is not set to private but the search is set to NO. the profile is not shared... a friend of mine is asking me to look for her blog and its just like that. well this one is sort of a dare if i'll be able to find it. i know her profile though, but i cant go look at it since it is not shared.

(By J, at 27 February, 2009 06:34) Edit Comment