A Consuming Experience

[Edit: I've now included a search form to do this - see the bottom of the sidebar of this blog (scroll down a bit); the Javascript code which you can add to your own template plus another usable search form is in this blog entry. Enjoy!]

The Blogger Help page says you can't yet search the profiles of fellow Blogger.com bloggers, but I discovered when tinkering with my own profile that you can do that, after a fashion.

At the moment you click on links in a profile, e.g. against an interest listed in your profile, to search for people with that interest mentioned in their profiles.

However, I've noticed the structure of the URL in the address bar for the search results page follows a certain pattern, and you can use that to search for certain words in the Interests, Movies, Musics or Books parts of Blogger profiles, even if those words don't appear in your own profile.

To do this, enter or paste this search string in your browser address bar, substituting as mentioned below:

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=i&q=vocal+music

"=i" searches within the Interests section of a profile, so instead of "=i" use

=m to search within movies

=s for music

=b for books

and instead of "vocal+music", after "q=" just type in your own search words with "+" between them, and that's all.

The above example searches the Interests section of profiles for "vocal music".

Another example (I've made this one clickable for convenience): to search for profiles with the word "Shawshank" in the "Movies" section, put in the address bar:
http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=m&q=shawshank

Works for me! Only thing is it doesn't show how many hits there are (but neither does the "search by clicking" method), so you may be for a long surf if you try certain popular words.

You'd be surprised how many people there are who are interested in... ahem well no, then again, maybe you wouldn't...

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