Use Google Custom Search Engine to make friends with bloggers
Written by amedeo on September 22nd, 2007
Google Custom Search Engine can make a search engine that scours your choice of Web sites and displays the results on your site.
Here’s one by yours truly that searches the sites of New Mexico bloggers.
Make other custom search engines that encompass:
- Web sites of government officials and candidates for office;
- Every news outlet in your state;
- Web sites of locally owned businesses;
- Anything else you can think of (a custom search engine to run with every article?).
You should do this because:
- It sorts information (a valuable journalistic function) of interest to your customers;
- It creates a reason for your customers to return to your Web site;
- It saves time for your customers because they don’t have to make their own custom search engine;
- If you create a local blogs search engine, it simplifies your search for links to local commentary that is related to the content you produce;
- It’s easy.
Great blog so far. Keep it up. And thanks to Jeff Jarvis for linking.
Custom search is great but you can also make filtered feeds. Have a look at this (with a new browser):
http://politik.dseneste.dk
It’s in danish, so you don’t understand the words (I think), but you will get the idea.
The service shows articles about Danish political parties from Danish media and Danish blogs. In one place you get everything (allmost) that is said about any political parti.
In this case it’s politics - it could be anything.
The feeds in the media section I get from the media. The blog feeds I get from Google Blog Search.
I combine and filter the feeds in Yahoo Pipes and generate new feeds with the filtered results.
Finally I show the feeds on the site with Google Ajax Feed API.
It’s basically a very focused feed reader. Great for keeping up to date on a specific topic. News organisations should make services like this for journalists.
Thank you for a new great new blog and good luck in your job hunting.
Here’s one that searches all Op/Ed’s of major papers: http://www.DailyOpEd.com
Thanks, Søren. You’re right, my Danish is really, really rusty (non-existent, that is), though I learned a few words from some Danes in London in my past (”Yeye iska dye” is the phonetic version of the Danish phrase for “I love you,” I think). Anyway, nice use of feeds, and thanks for sharing. Pipes can do some amazing things. I’d like to play more with Google Ajax Feed API.
And John, thank you, too, for the link. Nice work. The Free Beer Society (which I found at the bottom of your page) sounds like a promising social experiment.