Why a Financial Blog Search?
For my own blogging and stock research I became increasingly frustrated with my existing blog search options. Google Blog Search and Technorati worked somewhat, but often were riddled with spam blogs (splogs). A helpful reader told me about Google Custom Search Engines, and within a few hours I set up a CSE for trading and economic blogs that worked pretty well for basic research. I use it several times a week, and hope you find it useful as well.
Then came tax time. I wanted to streamline some of my accounts and find information to draft an agenda for a meeting with my CPA about various financial planning issues. There was a wealth of great information in personal finance blogs, but it took a lot of slogging through get-rich-quick and mortgage finance offers.
How can Financial Blog Search be improved?
The biggest shortcoming is in the search algorithm. I expected the CSE algorithm to be roughly the same as Google's sophisticated general searches. But its not. While I find the results useful, they are not as comprehensive as they should be. So if you work for Google, please please improve the algorithm.
If you don't work for Google but know XML and are willing to help, I am told that it is possible to slightly improve results by tweaking the weightings and other XML annotations. If you can help please send an email.
Finally, if there is a site I should add, or one which has dropped in quality that you feel should be deleted, please let me know.
How many sites does each CSE search?
The Trading, Investing and Economics Blog CSE and the Personal Finance Blog CSE each are supposed to search approximately 100-120 top rated blogs. At times, a Google defect (see below) causes only a subset of the designated blogs to be searched.
My site is supposed to be included in the CSE but I don't see it in a search for a topic I wrote about?
First, let me apologize. I really hoped that this would work perfectly. It doesn't. A support document for the Google CSE (Custom Search Engine) states that even though the CSE is supposed to work with up to 5,000 annotations, larger CSE's are sometimes given the algorithmic short-shrift:
If you see different results with your Custom Search Engine than you see on Google.com, check to make sure you've added the page you expect to see with no spelling errors or URL-pattern errors. If your Custom Search Engine includes more than three sites, the results may be from a subset of our index and may differ from the results of a 'site:' search on Google.com. . . . We're working to bring more complete results to all Custom Search Engines.
Have you considered other alternatives?
Yes. I looked into Rollyo, Yahoo! custom search, Windows Live Macros, and others. All are limited to 25-30 blogs. It looks like Google CSE is the best of a not-quite-ready-for-primetime lot.