Daypop for Searching Blogs

ONLINE: Daypop for Searching Blogs

Daypop is a specialty search engine that just crawls and indexes Weblogs and news sites. It does not try to get every blog out there. Instead it focuses on what it calls the best of the blogs and news sites. It does cover over 7,500 and refreshes its entire index once or more per day. The news sites include both English and non-English language
sources.

Daypop is a great search engine for getting news from beyond the traditional media. While it does not have sophisticated advanced search features, it does offer a few important options. Its search defaults to a Boolean AND and supports phrase searching with quotation marks. Use a to force a stop word search or the ­ to exclude terms. No full Boolean searching or OR searching is available.

Daypop has an advanced search page, but both the basic and advanced offer four content-type limits: the default news and blogs, just news, just blogs, or RSS headlines. The advanced search also has language limits, country limits, and the choice of how many results to display.

Daypop takes after Google in several ways. The search results use a keyword-in-context display, have a link to a cached copy of the page, and include the size of the page. The results are labeled with an N for the news sources and a W for Weblogs. The blog hits also have a link to "citations," which then finds other blogs that link to the original hit.

The ability to browse sideways with the "citations" link to see which other blogs are providing commentary is one way to use Daypop to get more than a single blog's viewpoint. Daypop also has a couple of special pages that use their own link analysis to identify top interests in the indexed blogging community. Their "Top 40" page is a ranked list of links that are most frequently linked by bloggers in their daily section (not just anywhere on their Web pages). The page even offers graphic depictions of the rise and decline of each link's popularity. A similar "Top News" page shows the most-linked-to news stories.