Tuesday, 7 August 2007

Blogger profiles: how to search Blogger profiles, not just browse






UPDATE August 2009: Blogger recently changed something behind the scenes so this doesn't work anymore. Hopefully they'll soon provide an official search for these subjects. Or not...

With old Blogger, you can could click on an interest, movie, etc in a Blogger member's profile to find other bloggers with a similar interest e.g. Morris dancing - or indeed kissing or chocolate (in which case you might want to check this out!). But that feature vanished with the rollout of the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta, despite its widgety goodness and enhanced developer-friendliness.

However, Blogger Buzz have just announced its restoration. Which means that my old forms for searching Blogger profiles (even though Blogger say you can't search profiles yet!) are working again. You can even search for Blogger users by geographical location.

I don't normally repeat old posts, but in this case I'll reproduce for your convenience most of the search forms from my previous post on searching Blogger, the bits to do with finding Blogger bloggers anyway.

How to find Blogger members by interests, movies, music, books, (updated) industry, occupation

To search the profiles of Blogger or Blogspot members to find Blogger users who have a particular interest or like particular movies, music or books, or (added 1o August 2007) work in a particular industry or have a particular occupation, use the search form below (opens in a new window).







(see this post if you want the code to insert the search form in your own blog or webpage).

Now I didn't use to know how exactly Blogger ordered or sorted the search results, but Tyrone's recent Buzz post explains it:
The Browse Profile results are tuned to show you people who have recently updated their blogs at the top, so you can find blogs with fresh posts.


Don't forget that although it says Results 1-10 on the results page, there could be more than 10 results - you can see more results if you keep hitting that Continue button.

How to search for Blogger.com members by geographical location

Use the form below to find Blogger.com or Blogspot.com bloggers living near you, or Blogger users from another particular geographical place (with thanks to Michael Bates for the syntax and Kirk for sussing out that they use standard international country codes and providing the code for the full list!).

Note again as above that there could be more than 10 results, and also note that:
  • Country and state, province or city is essential to find a town - you have to enter both country and state/province/city for it to work, you just can't enter a town without entering the state too (though you can enter just the state etc without a town, or the country without a state or province etc)
  • No abbreviations - you have to enter the full name of the state or town, no abbreviations (e.g. Ca won't find anything, you need California).
Find Blogger.com members - anywhere! (results open in a new window)







How to find Blogger.com bloggers by name, and search their profiles

To search for a particular Blogger member by their username, or just to search within Blogger members' profiles for a combination of things e.g. someone with particular interests in a particular location, a workaround is to use the form below - but bear in mind it only searches profiles which have been indexed on Google - not all of them are. Also "London" can find someone named "London" as well as people living in London, so if you want something specific best use one of the other forms - unfortunately you can't combine a specific location search with a specific interests etc search, the only way to search both is to use this form, bearing in mind the one issue I mentioned:

Search words in Blogger profiles via Google:

As and when Blogger officially roll out their own search facility, I wonder if they'll let us combine the different kinds of searches - find someone else who likes the Flying Lizards, the Golden Bough, Spinal Tap and drystonewalling and lives in your town, for instance?!

Fill in your own profile?

If you haven't already, do fill in your own profile if you'd like to be stalked tracked down by your interests etc.

Or hide it if you don't!

8 comments:

Christian Student Scientist said...

Thank you for very useful search tools! Can you possibly create one for searching "About me" field on blogspot.com profiles? I find that the most relevant information is contained there, yet there is no search tool for it that I know of...
Thank you!

Improbulus said...

Hi CSS, thanks for your comment.

I'm afraid I've not figured out how to search "About Me", please do raise that request with Blogger though, it'll up to them to decide if they want to implement something like that.

Anonymous said...

Mr. i tried and i still cant find blogers profiles...¿Whats wrong?

Improbulus said...

Unfortunately Blogger have recently changed things behind the scenes so this doesn't work anymore.

It could be a sign they're going to introduce their own official search facility for it - we'll have to wait & see.

Kim said...

Could you have them combined, i.e. "AND." It did "OR" when I input a search term in both places (interests and location) you made :)

Improbulus said...

Kim I'm afraid not - the underlying search mechanisms are by Blogger/Google, I've just provided a more convenient way to do them. I wish they'd enable an "and" search too.

Anonymous said...

the following appears to want to allows a search by last name, any guess as to what the other query string param would be to actually do the search:

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=n

Siti said...

http://www.blogger.com/profile-find.g?t=n

the url above allows search by first name and last name.
now i wonder what the query string param would be to search for display name.