The Real Blogger Status

We see an occasional sign of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I let my readers search my entire blog? or Why does my Search not find all of my posts? Both of these questions - and more - are seen, because not every blog owner is aware of the limitations, and possibilities, of each search technique.

Long ago, Google provided Google BlogSearch, as one a way of surfing the blogosphere . One of the challenges of using BlogSearch was that we were never sure what we were surfing. Some people wanted to see only "blogspot.com" published Blogger blogs - and other people wanted to see all Blogger blogs, including those not published to "blogspot.com". Some ingenious blog owners published "Blogger blogs" of doubtful integrity, simply using the URL of "blogspot.com" - and people accepted such blogs as righteous, simply because Blog Search would list them in a search page.

Sometimes, your readers will benefit from more than a navbar based, direct blog search, of a single blog. As I discussed some time ago, if you have a single blog, and want to provide a very simple search, you can do that using a Blogger dynamic search in an HTML / JavaScript gadget . You can provide a gadget to do a direct blog search, in addition to the search gadget in the Navbar - or (if you block the Navbar), you can do this instead of the search gadget in the Navbar. But what if you have multiple blogs, maybe in a custom domain cluster, that you want your reader to search in combination? Or maybe you would like refinements to your search? That's when you use the Google Custom Search Engine.

When your blog gets larger, you'll want your readers to be able to find the content easier - sometimes using more detail than can be found in the Archives index. You can generally use Labels for a more comprehensive index of the blog contents - but both labels, and titles, index the posts based on your vision of the blog. What if you want your readers to view your blog, on their terms? This is where the Navbar, with its search box, becomes useful.

The Blogosphere, including Blogger blogs both published to Blog*Spot, and to non-Blog*Spot URLs, is immense, and is growing constantly. In the Blogosphere, you'll find blogs created as a "first blog" by beginning bloggers, as well as blogs created by those who have dozens of other blogs already. Anybody with Internet access is entitled to make his / her own contribution. If you want to estimate, in any 10 minute slice of time, what blogs are being published, you can examine the Recently Updated Blogs list. That list, however, only shows you what blogs are being updated - it in no way shows you what blogs, in total, occupy the Blogger portion of the Blogosphere. In reality, there is no way a single, flat list could ever enumerate the entire blog population. When you view Recently Updated Blogs on your own, you'll understand this to be true.