Sunday Salon: Book Bloggers Search Engine

I always do my best to find links to other book bloggers’ reviews of whatever book I’m reading to include at the bottom of the post. I started this in part because I wanted to emphasize that my opinion is just one of many, and there’s always someone out there who loved a book I didn’t care for, and vice versa. But I also wanted to help highlight all of the work that we do – anyone can go to Amazon or LibraryThing and find more reviews for a book, but book bloggers are an awesome little community, and I enjoy spreading the linky love when I can.

At first, I was searching my feed reader to find other people’s posts, but that quickly got frustrating when I realized it wasn’t pulling from posts older than a few months. Regular googling works okay, but there’s a lot of sorting through corporate non-book-blogger pages. So I created a custom search engine that will just search the sites I specify – and I gave it about 200 sites, which I realize is just a drop in the bucket of who’s out there, but you have to start somewhere.

Here’s the link: Book Blogs Search. Try it out and tell me what you think.

My worry is: am I duplicating something that already exists out there? I know there are various book blog registry-type sites out there… do they have a search-among-members function? I’m not going to put a lot of effort into maintaining this if someone else has already done the work for me, but if this is something that other people might find useful, I’ll look into giving it its own page, creating a listing of searched sites, etc.

EDIT: Okay, apparently people would find this useful. Now I need to ask for help… Send me the URLs of book blogs that you think should be included in the search. I’ll work on putting up a listing of what’s currently included, but in the meantime, don’t worry about duplications – I don’t think it’s a big deal if I accidentally set the search engine to include a site more than once, and the more book blogs we can search, the merrier.