Tracking Buzz with Blog Search Tools

One of the nicest features of two of the blog search engines is their ability to help you keep track of how much usage a particular word or URL is getting. Both Ice Rocket and BlogPulse offer this feature. Since blog search engines are still far away from catching up to the millions of blogs that are out there, the results you'll get when clicking the "trend" link vary quite widely.

At this point, Blogpulse's trend tool is better for three reasons: 1) it allows you to go further back into the past (six months vs. three), 2) by clicking specific points on the graph, you can view blog postings for that particular day, and 3) you can compare up to three different search terms and have them show up on your graph.

This last point is best illustrated by the following graph which shows just how little most people care about political scandals. In my chart, I searched Blogpulse for the last six months for the terms "downing street memo," "cindy sheehan," and "hurricane katrina."


Categories: blogpulse, icerocket, buzz, research, blog help