Blog search engines have become more and more sophisticated, and nowadays you can do a blog search on a variety of topics and hit paydirt. Here is a list of some of the best blog search engines out there - take ‘em for a blog search test drive and see what you think.

Blog Search Engines

• Search Blogs with Ask.com: There’s a new blog search engine in town from Ask.com. The best thing about it? It’s wonderfully intertwined with Ask’s (in my opinion) best property, Bloglines.
• Opinmind: Opinmind is a unique kind of blog search engine. It not only searches blogs, but it searches those blogs for opinions expressed on whatever subject you might be looking for.
• Sphere: My overall impression of Sphere is that it’s a blog search engine with some great features, relevant results, and an excellent overall user experience.
• Technorati: Technorati is a real-time search engine dedicated to the blogosphere. It only searches through blogs to find exactly what you’re looking for. At the time of this writing, Technorati was tracking over 22 million sites and over a billion links, a mind-boggling amount.
• Google Blog Search: The sheer simplicity, ease of use, and fast delivery of the service, which is really a hallmark of all Google’s offerings, is going to draw a lot of converts who don’t want to wait around for clogged databases to finally get through churning results.
• TalkDigger: TalkDigger is a search engine that finds what links are talking about links. Make sense? Well, in a nutshell, TalkDigger lets you enter in a URL, and then goes out and finds what sites (from a variety of different search engines) are linking to it. It’s a conversation search engine.
• LJSeek: LjSeek.com is a search engine dedicated to only sifting through the LiveJournal blogging community. If you’re a dedicated LiveJournal user or just looking for information, you’ll find that LjSeek comes in handy.
• Daypop: With Daypop’s blog search engine, the user can "search 59000 news sites, weblogs and RSS feeds for current events and breaking news." Daypop also has a cool Blog Archives feature; see what was buzzworthy in the blogosphere in days past.
• Blogdex:A blog search engine and a "finger on the pulse" kind of deal; Blogdex is put together by MIT and is a service that "tracks the diffusion of information through the weblog community."
• Technorati: Technorati is a blog search engine that is a real-time recorder of what is going on in the blogosphere. At the time of this writing Technorati was tracking a whopping 20.8 million sites and 1.7 billion links.
• Bloogz.com: Search blogs with the Bloogz blog search engine; you can also take a look at which blogs are the most popular at the moment.
• Blogwise.com: "Blogwise is a site about developing a portal to blogs around the world, efficiently, quickly and nicely." More of a blog directory than a blog search engine, but they do have a site search available and an impressive amount of blogs in their directory (over 100,000 at the time of this writing).
• Ice Rocket Blog Search: Excellent blog search engine that includes the option to search by link. Ice Rocket also has a pretty good advanced search page.
• Google Blog Search: Google Blog Search is relatively new to the world of blog search engines and at the time of this writing is still in beta. Doesn’t retrieve many results at this time and there are a lot of useability issues, but again, Google Blog Search is still just in beta. I’ll update as they work some of these issues out.
• BlogPulse: BlogPulse is a dream of a blog search engine. Includes really cool BlogPulse user tools such as Trend Search and Conversation Tracker.
• Bloglines: Not only can you search the blogosphere with Bloglines blog search engine, you can also subscribe to site feeds and view all your feeds within Bloglines’ feed reader. Here’s my Bloglines subscriptions.
• Blogdigger: Blogdigger is a solid blog search engine that also gives you the option to search for local blogs, an option I immediately added to my bookmarks.
• Waypath: Waypath bills itself as a "blog discovery engine". This blog search engine features the ability to identify topic streams, which basically means that they pull out the meat of every subject post.
• Findory: Findory is a super-charged blog search engine. Findory not only finds blogs that you’re interested in, but "brings you news articles from thousands of worldwide sources…and custom-builds a personalized newspaper for each reader." Very cool service; try building your own Findory page.
• PubSub:"PubSub is a matching service that instantly notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription." PubSub searches blogs and is technically not a blog search engine, but since it does search blogs I included it here. Think of PubSub as breaking news alerts on steroids - it’s an extremely powerful and convenient search service and once you start one, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.
• Feedster: "17,268,315 feeds indexed and fully searchable." Feedster is a blog search engine with a twist: it searches and indexes anything with a feed, which covers a wide gamut.

What is ZoomInfo?

ZoomInfo is a free people search engine that scours the Web for information about people, and nothing else. Trying to find people using a general search engine such as Google brings back a ton of results, however, those results can take a while to filter through and they’re not always good. ZoomInfo takes care of this problem by focussing in one niche: people.

ZoomInfo takes searching for people on the Web to a whole new level; by using a combination of various technologies to crawl the Web (Web sites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings, etc. - from ZoomInfo About Page), ZoomInfo organizes all the information about people into a readable, sensible format - profiles that can also be searched within ZoomInfo by corporate headhunters.

How to Use ZoomInfo

There are really two separate groups of people that ZoomInfo is primarily aimed at, and that would be searchers who are looking either for themselves or various people in their lives (friends, family, colleagues, etc.), or human resources type folks who are looking to recruit their next employee. I’ll take a look at these two disparate groups separately.

Free People Search with ZoomInfo

Using ZoomInfo to find people is simple - just navigate to the main ZoomInfo home page and type in a name. Similarly, you can also look up company information by clicking on the "Company" text link above the main search query bar.

Now, of course, I looked for my name - Wendy Boswell. Seven results came back, with the fifth one being most accurate.

My profile had a couple of different links on there; mostly to blogs and Web sites that have cited me in some way. I was given the chance to edit my profile; this is where I could add a lot more to my ZoomInfo profile (and make it searchable by Google as well).

Obviously the more of a Web presence that you have, the more information is going to be on ZoomInfo about you. For instance, Bill Gates has a pretty extensive profile, as does Steve Jobs.

If you would like to add more information to what ZoomInfo most likely already has about you, registration is free and only takes a minute. More detailed information about people and organizations can also be found by upgrading to ZoomInfo’s premium subscription; however, unless you really plan on using this a LOT I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that you upgrade (it would be more appropriate for HR folks, in my opinion).

ZoomInfo - Find An Employee

ZoomInfo offers Power Search as a great way to find employees - and according to ZoomInfo, a lot of companies do use it: "(our customers) include over 20% of the Fortune 500, 9 of the top 10 executive recruiting firms and thousands of others." This is a paid service; however, I think that it would be well worth the money spent, especially for a top corporate firm looking to add a very specific area of expertise to their employee talent base.

How Does ZoomInfo Get My Information?

None of this information is anything that you or I couldn’t find on the Web. It’s all freely accessible. All that ZoomInfo does is organize this information for you into a short and sweet summary. From the FAQ: "We only summarize information that is already available to the general public through any major search engine such as Google or Yahoo, and focus on a person’s professional achievements much like a resume does. We also give our users control over their own Web Summaries—you can choose to edit or even delete information in your summary."

Why Should I Use ZoomInfo?

Depending on what you’re looking for:

• If you’re a casual people searcher: ZoomInfo is a great way to find information about people without having to search through a ton of irrelevant search results.
• If you’re looking for your next employee: You’ve got a great HR tool at your fingertips with ZoomInfo; it’s easy to use and has extensive power-searching parameters available (make sure you look at the video tour - it’s on the ZoomInfo main page and comes up as a popup).

Looking to do a free public records search on the Web? I’ve put together a Top Ten list of where to find the best free public record search databases online, from obituaries to census records. Note: Depending on the state or country that you live in, you might not be able to access more personal public records, such as birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, marriage certificates, etc., without A)showing physical proof of identification or B)paying a fee.

1. Google
“free public records search google”
Yes, Google definitely belongs on this list of free public records search sites. Not only is it free, it’s also one of the world’s largest databases of information. For more info on how to use Google as your own public records locator, read my articles titled Google Search, Google Cheat Sheet, Google Reverse Lookup, and How to Create a Google News Alert (a great way to track mentions of your topic across the Web).

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