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Is there a good “blog search” out there?

106 points by pajtai ↗ HN
There are certain keywords that are dominated by SEO optimization to the point that it is difficult to find results that are from other sources than a corporate website. Often the results I find most useful are the ones created by individuals in their "spare time" that they post on their blogs.

Is there a good "blog search" out there?

Is there currently something like Google Blog Search out there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Blog_Search

34 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 92.7 ms ] thread
TekMol
Aren't all those SEO optimized pages "blog posts"?

How would a search engine separate the "bad" blogs from the "good" ones?

cpach
Google used to be great at exactly that.
demadog
The only thing I’ve figured out that works is building a Google Custom Search Engine with your favorite list of 50-100 blogs but it’s far from perfect and doesn’t help with new discovery.
hidden-spyder
Is the custom Google search engine same as the main one in terms of its algorithm?
demadog
Partially but no, it’s comparatively pretty bad after playing with it a lot.

It seems to be based on a much older and more literal algorithm where it buries a relevant post on page 3 just because the keyword was not perfectly in the title.

Probably intentional or they just don’t prioritize since a small % of people use it.

Better to use “site:” search for your fav blogs instead.

mg
The prerequesite would be a list of non spammy blogs.

Could it be crowdsourced, similar to how ad blocker filter lists are crowdsourced?

kklisura
There was this [1], posted a month ago on HN [2].

[1] https://blogsurf.io/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149

mg
This shows how hard it is to make such a search engine.

I tried "indie makers" and "digital nomad" in the directory and both listed only one blog: Pieter Levels. And that one is dead for quite a while and just redirects to his Twitter.

mawise
I've emailed with the blogsurf operator, they have a really cool Ranking algorithm but it's expensive to run so they only index a relatively small number of blogs.
AnonHP
The blogsurf.io site cannot fulfill this need as it is a manual effort by the maintainer. I submitted a blog around the time it was on a Show HN here and that’s still not added (said blog is not some marketing or sales blog with low value). Seems like the maintainer is selective in accepting submissions based on their biases or is too busy.
Alekhine
Marginalia works pretty good for finding smaller blogs.
ufmace
Marginalia search engine is worth a try: https://search.marginalia.nu/

It's a search engine meant to be biased towards long-form content with minimal marketing and javascript trickery

polalavik
For tech specific: refined.blog is a good resource. Not necessarily sure it counts as a search engine, but definitely a good aggregation of tech blogs.
macintux
Please add "Ask HN:" to the front of posts like this.
pajtai
Sorry, thanks for the tip. Looks like I cannot edit the title anymore, sorry.
macintux
Not a big deal, just makes it harder to identify, and occasionally people will collate past "Ask HN" topics for various purposes.
betwixthewires
wiby.me only indexes pages without JS, so that's a start.
ecedeno
I had that exact same thought last year and threw together a small project[1] to index some blogs. I didn't work much on it, though.

[1] https://www.blogdorp.com/

NelsonMinar
Feedly has a "search all Feedly" mode. That will capture mostly blogs or at least things with RSS feeds. As folks have said blogs ain't what they used to be, many blog-like sites now are aggressively managed content farms.

You probably know this but a lot of folks find adding "reddit" to a search term helps them find genuine discussions.

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jenett
Not all searchable but a lot of blogs to discover:

https://blogroll.org/

https://collection.mataroa.blog/

https://gossipsweb.net/

https://href.cool/

https://indieseek.xyz/links/

https://links.yesterweb.org/

https://marijn.uk/linkroll/

https://maya.land/blogroll.opml

https://nodes.indieseek.xyz/

https://sadgrl.online/links.html

https://stumblingon.com/

https://terra.finzdani.net/

https://theforest.link/

https://waxy.org/category/links/

https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/

https://www.mojeek.com/

https://yesterweb.org/link-directory/