@brentsimmons I would absolutely love this. Have you seen or heard of any open source projects like this? I’d love to contribute.

@brentsimmons Paging @bradenslen (giant magnifying-glass symbol in the sky!)…not that Brad would necessarily build it, but he’s your guy for knowing what obscure search engines might be out there already, possibly doing this or something like it. // @adamclaxon

@brentsimmons do you recall the names of any of the blog search engines from the past? I’m curious and would like to research further.

@adamclaxon I don’t of any such open source projects, no. Unfortunately! I wish someone were working on this already.

@wezm Technorati used to do at least some of what @brentsimmons mentioned (although you couldn’t tell that from the Wikipedia article!). I don’t know any of the other ones, though.

@smokey do you recall anything about how it worked or what it was like to use? I’m curious if they indexed all RSS they found, which would lead to noise, or if people manually submit feeds etc. Trying to work how how it would be blog oriented and not get taken over by junk RSS.

@brentsimmons Both blog search engines and rss engines are dead. At least I have not found anything, and I looked. I did find one RSS search engine RSS Micro but you can no longer register to add your feed. Also the Copyright is 2016 so it looks like it's just sort of drifting.

There still are some blog directories but most charge to list which, to me is an indicator that they a more about selling links for PageRank than trying to index the blogosphere.

Other than that Joe Jenett lists a lot of blogs on his various curated link blogs several of these are searchable. I list blogs on Indieseek but it's not exclusive to blogs. @kicks has some really neat blogs listed in href.cool But frankly all of us are small beer compared to Technoratti, Bloglines of the past.

I'd love to see a revival of both blog search engines and RSS feed engines. //cc. @smokey @adamclaxon

@smokey @wezm Tantek Çelik @t the former Chief Technologist for Technorati is a member here and a co-founder of Indieweb.org. I don't know if he monitors Micro.blog but he might be best to explain the basics of how Technorati worked. He's a very smart guy.

@wezm When I started my blog back in 2006, you had to “claim” your blog on Technorati, which involved registering/submitting and then posting something on your blog for verification (an archaic version of the rel="me" stuff the IndieWeb uses today). So I believe it was built, at least at that time, as a self-submitted, old-school (Yahoo, dmoz)-type web directory. They perhaps added popular blogs themselves for “completeness”? And then you had a search interface to that, which I think could include blogs or posts (this was pre-tags/hashtags, but maybe blog categories were also indexed?)

I really didn’t do more than register/claim my blog and play around with it briefly afterwards (Planet Mozilla at the time was really diverse and already enough of a firehose, so I didn’t need to do a lot of searching to find interesting blogs), so sadly I can’t tell you much more. Hopefully some of the longtime bloggers here will chime in with more, or can point you to people who can….

@bradenslen @wezm @t Oh, that’s great!

Barring that, it looks like the Internet Archive has a pretty decent capture of the site from back then (search itself doesn’t work, but you can see the UI and so forth), and over a long period of time, starting in 2002.

@smokey ahh great, thanks for the details

Regarding blog search engines @brentsimmons; I know it's google, but you can create a custom search engine using schema.org types. This one is limited to “Blog” cse.google.com/cse

@Cowlibob Interesting! I had no idea.

@brentsimmons I like this idea a lot! Not gonna promise anything, but maybe...