Stay GIF: How to find other blogs to read

This is a quick guide to searching for other blogs to read, now that Google's blog-search tool has been retired.

Locating interesting blogs and websites to regularly read - applying a magnifying glass to the internet

If you write a blog, then reading other blogs "in your niche" (ie about similar topics) is a really good idea. This lets you keep up with what's going on and what other people are saying, and helps you to think up new blog-post ideas.

An RSS-reader is a great tool for managing everything you need to read: it's basically a folder with links to all the blogs and websites you want to follow, which shows when they have been updated. To make best use of it. as soon as you see an interesting website, go to your RSS reader software and subscribe to the website's RSS-feed there-and-then: otherwise you will almost certainly forget. Alternatively you can subscribe-by-email - provided the site offers that option - but many bloggers find that their email gets overwhelmed if they do this with more than a few sites.

Some RSS software suggests websites that you might like to follow - although generally I've found that the suggestions are pretty broad and not overly useful.

So - how else can you find new blogs to read?

How to find other blogs to read

Google's BlogSearch tool, RIP

Google previously gave us a dedicated blog-search tool at www.google.com/blogsearch, which was available from various places, and still comes up in the search results if you google "how to find other blogs"

But apparently this is now re-directing to the Google home page. And even though I'm seeing that the re-directed URL is https://www.google.com/blogsearch?gws_rd=ssl - the search results that it returns are most definitely not just blogs.)

You can still get to it without re-direction at the moment, by going to https://www.google.com/?tbm=blg, but the predictions are that this won't work for much longer.

Google News

This tool is available at https://news.google.com

It looks like there are a couple of versions available.

In the newer one, you can apparently click Search Tools, select the “All news” drop down, and choose “Blogs.

In the older one, which I still have, to prioritise blogs in your news-feed you need to:

Click on the gear wheel (button with a picture of a cog on it) near the top right of the screeen,
Click on the Settings link that is to the right of Save, and
Under Sources set Blogs to More and Press Releases to None
Click Save Changes.

At the moment, the News content from blogs isn't the best - but indications from Google are that it will get better as news-bloggers register their sites.

Search

Old-fashioned searching is probably one of the most powerful way of finding blogs. To use Search to find other blogs:

If you follow a topic, then you should regularly search in Google for interesting questions in your niche, but not choose the most-obvious results from the results page. Instead choose the ones you haven't heard of, but which look promising.

Use a different search engine - either a mainstream one like www.bing.com or www.yahoo.com, or a more specialist custom search in your niche.

Include the word "blog" when you are searching. (This returns websites that use the word "blog" as well as blogs, so isn't perfect. But it sometimes helps to turn up new sources.)

Search for interesting key words together with the phrase "site:blogspot.com". Now, this will only give you sites that don't have custom domains - but some of them are great blogs.

Browse

One of the most important ways of finding sites is by - finding sites. Be curious with everything you read: ask who wrote it, who else they follow, and what they are telling you about where they got their information.

Visit their sites, instead of just reading their blog posts in your RSS subscription tool, and look at their blogrolls and lists of interesting sites, and see if there are any you don't know about.

Follow links in their posts, and assess if they are pointing to blogs that you should be reading.

Look at their Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites: she who they follow or interact with - and then check if those people have blogs.

Ask

This may seem strange but simply asking your readers for suggestions can unearth some blogs that you won't find any other way. Of course it won't work if you ask on your blog and don't have many regular readers yet - but you have nothing to lose.

But there's no reason why you cannot ask in other mediums - eg by leaving a question on your Facebook page or the page of anyone else who might know (and will let you write there0

Similarly you could post a question on Twitter, and a time when people with lots of knowledge about blogs in your niche are likely to be posting.

Use Blogger's Profile linking service

This approach was first described in 2007 - which seems like eons ago. And today won't work for bloggers who have a Google+ profile. But it might work still for new bloggers, in particular.