BlogCatalog Launches Social Media Search Engine

Look out Technorati and Google Blog Search. BlogCatalog is gaining on you.

BlogCatalog.com has just announced the launch of a new “total aggregation search engine” that helps you find anything on their blog directory and social network as well as on more than 20 other social media websites.

For instance, you can select “All Results” above the search box and search for blog herald to get a section-by-section list of BlogCatalog members, BlogCatalog discussions, other slice-and-dice results from BlogCatalog, and (perhaps most interestingly) results from StumbleUpon, Delicious, Twitter and many other popular social bookmarking or social networking sites.

For any aggregate search, the URL is:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/topic/your+search+terms/

With the added search features, BlogCatalog now boasts a blog directory and search engine similar in many ways to that of Technorati and a social search aspect similar to that of FriendFeed.

BlogCatalog has over 100,000 bloggers and more than 150,000 blogs in its directory, which combats spam by manually evaluating each blog submission on several criteria.

The site also hosts a growing member discussion area, a politics channel, widgets and tools to help bloggers improve their blogs and connect with other bloggers.

One thing I really like about the BlogCatalog social search is that you can subscribe to a feed for any search query and thus get new results delivered to your RSS reader as they become available. (Example: Barack Obama social search / search feed for Barack Obama.)

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Thoughts for improvement

1. Emphasize the social search aspect visually so that users more easily grasp what it does.
2. Provide a more detailed time-related context to search results so people know how long ago each social event happened or a blog post was published, etc. Right now you can see what happened today, yesterday and so on, but I’d love to ba able to limit searches to the last, say, 24 hours.
3. Enable users to limit searches to high-authority blogs or social media power users only.

I can’t wait to play with the new BlogCatalog search and see how its quality compares to that of other blog and social media search engines.

Have you tried the new BlogCatalog search engine? How do you think it compares to Google Blog Search or Technorati? Do you think it’s a game-changer or a dud? How would you improve it?

Disclaimer: I am currently helping the BlogCatalog team as a consultant.