The blogosphere may need to ripen a bit before Blogdigger's new local blog search tool becomes useful. The tool itself has some sweet features, and it seems to have good potential both for the user and advertiser.
To do a search, you must indicate a location (by city or zip), while keywords are optional. I did more than a dozen searches, using small, medium and large cities and a variety of topics from restaurants to sports to gardening.
Here's one of the better search results. I looked for "sports" and "San Francisco, CA" and got this as the third of 99 hits sorted by date (you also can sort by relevancy, which actually might be the better default setting):
May 03, 2005
Where
your host finally gets around to recording another podcast detailing
his brief weekend trip to Reno. Find out what sports book kind of
blows, which ones are okay, and what hotel had rooms overlooking the
scenic air conditioner on the roof. You can also find out what I’m
doing this weeken...
brainwagon
[ Feed -
Focus -
Exclude ]
by
Mark
at 10:40 AM
17.4 miles from san francisco, ca - Map It!
This particular blogger posts on many topics (note the "Tags"), including the Oakland A's. OK, so I searched "Sports" and "San Francisco" and found someone interested in the A's. That is cool.
The tags are useful, and I like the Feed, Focus and Exclude options. They're fairly intuitive.
As I said, the results seemed even better when I selected "relevancy" as the default sort.
When I searched on smaller suburban Bay Area communities, I struck out for the most part. Whether the problem is the number of bloggers in those communities or Blogdigger's ability to index them, I don't know.
I do think this tool is one worth watching. It's already gotten the attention of MarketingVOX, blogger Susan Mernit and of Search Engine Watch, which notes that you may want to use GeoURL to help search tools locate your blog.