LISZEN: Library Blog Search Engine

Just yesterday I thought someone should make a customized search engine with library blogs using the new service from Google Co-op. Well, today (reading my LISNews email from two days ago) I find someone already has. Garrett Hungerford of Library Zen has created LISZEN.

LISZEN already includes over 500 library blogs. Garrett tells his sources in his post about the engine. I ran several searches. Being self-center, I first checked what happens when I put in "ricklibrarian" to see if I was included and I found that I was. The result was a mixture of my main page, specific ricklibrarian posts, and other blog posts linking to ricklibrarian.

I then searched to see if I could find LibrarianinBlack's post about search.yahoo.com. I found it. The info was in a post about Search Engine Watch and not as the separate post as I remember. I might not have found it scanning through the posts I have saved in Bloglines.

Then I tried to find Aaron Schmidt's post about libraries and trust. When I searched "trust aaron schmidt" I found just a link to Walking Paper in general, links from other blogs, and the RSS of comments to the post. I did not find the post itself. The I tried "trust walking paper" and it was the first item. (I hope the lesson here is not that you can't "trust aaron schmidt.")

It might still be interesting to build more limited search engines with the Google Co-op service, taking just segments of the library blog world. It should be easy to do.