How to Use the Google Blog Search
Blogs have grown in popularity along with the Internet and Internet services. Blogs are a way for anyone to express themselves on any topic and share it with the world—anonymously, professionally, etc. Unless you are familiar with great blog sites and communities, it might be difficult to find a blog that interests you. Thankfully, Google has made this easy with Google Blogs. Basically, it’s all the greatness of Google—devoted to blogs! Here’s how to get started!
First, from the Google home page, click the “more” link on the top of the page, then click “Blogs”. You will be redirected to Google Blogs, where you can search for blogs or blog topics.
Of course, to start a blog search, you can simply type the keywords of your choice into the main search bar and click “Search Blogs”. You can also browse the Top Stories section for popular blog entries (directly below the search bar). There are several other features that may interest you.
The left side bar contains popular categories to choose from. Click any of these categories, like Politics, or Movies, or Sports to see listings of Top Stories in that category. On the right is a list of “Hot queries” to see what everyone else is looking for or talking about, and “Recent Posts” to see what’s just been published.
When you perform a search on Google Blogs, you will be redirected to a list of related blogs that typically post on that topic. Under that is a listing of actual blog entries that mention your particular topic. If you want a blog you can subscribe to and read often, you probably want to check out the related blogs. If you want to just read current blog posts on a topic this once, you should probably look in the list below the related blogs.
If you want to find something more specific, you might want to click the “Advanced Blog Search” link to the right of the search bar. This will allow you to specify what blog title or author you are looking for. You can also specify the date of the post to only show entries within a certain range or since a certain day.
If you find a blog that you would like to subscribe to, you can often set up a subscription or email alerts with that individual blog site. Or, you can set up an RSS feed. This is a feature on your browser that allows you to see in plain text view the websites of your choice. They show only the recent changes or addition to the site. This is great for blogs, because typically the only changes are a new blog post. RSS feeds are stored to your browser and you can check your favorite blogs easily from here. It doesn’t load the bandwidth-consuming backgrounds, colors, pictures, and music, which makes RSS feeds great for those who have dial-up and other types of slow Internet connections.
At the bottom of the page of results, you’ll see some additional resources, provided by Google, if you want to stay updated on various blog posts on a certain subject:
*Email alerts—every time a keyword or keyword phrase appears in a blog post, you will get an alert from Google notifying you that of the post and providing a link to it.
*Google News—a great companion to blogs. If you can’t find a blog post about it, news articles are the next best thing. Click this link to search for the same keywords in Google News.
*Blog Search Gadget—If you have IGoogle as your home page, you can add a gadget for blog searches to that page. This is just one of the many ways to customize your Google homepage.
*Google Reader feed—If you want to see a feed of blog entries on your favorite subject, simply add a blog search feed for those keywords to your Google Reader. Google Reader is a great way to access news and information quickly and easily without having to navigate to and load dozens of different sites. It’s like a personalized, customizable Internet magazine!
Thanks to Internet service and the many tools and features available on websites like Google, finding and reading your favorite blogs is fast and easy!
Written by Hannah Miller, Director of Online Marketing and Customer Service Rep, Copper.net.
Copper.net is a nationwide Internet Services provider that is all-American owned and operated. Call today, 1-800-336-3318 or sign up online. Check out my blog for this and more great articles! http://www.copper.net/wire
This video by the ICE Marketing Group, LLC goes over how to set up a blog using the Google Blogger system. This is part one of two.
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