During Marshall Kirkpatrick’s session at WordCamPDX last weekend, he talked about some of his customized search engines, which inspired me to create one of my own.
Google does a great job of finding everything for a keyword, but it doesn’t really know how to filter for posts matching less measurable criteria. For example, a standard Google search can’t filter for the blogs of people that I think are really smart and interesting. The idea behind the custom search engine is that I can tell Google which sites I want it to search, and then Google does its magic to find the best posts within the limits that I provide. Marshall uses his custom search engines as a starting place for research to get quotes for blog posts or learn more about a topic he’s researching.
I have plans for a few others, but I wanted to start with a custom search engine for online community thought leaders. I’m hoping it will help me when I’m doing research for blog posts or consulting clients. In order to keep the results relevant, I’m limiting the number of sites searched to a very small number of blogs from people that I think are thought leaders in the online community space. While I have a huge respect for many people who work at companies that make community platform software, I’m deliberately not including blogs from vendors to attempt to keep the search vendor neutral.
Here are the first blogs to make the cut:
- Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang
- Online Community Report by Bill Johnston
- Web Community Forum
- Connie Benson
- CommunityGuy by Jake McKee
- Horse Pig Cow by Tara Hunt
- Factory City by Chris Messina
- Vanity alert: Yes, I also included Fast Wonder in the search
You can try the Online Community Thought Leader search for yourself and let me know what you think:
Now the big question for you:
Who did I miss? Did I leave someone amazing off of the list? If so, you can leave suggestions in the comments.
Related Fast Wonder Blog posts: