I like building search engines. It’s been my job for the past five years. Unfortunately, our focus has shifted to less search engine and more ad distributor. I still experiment in my spare time, and my latest creation is blogspyder.

Last weekend Dena and I stopped at the grocery store after seeing The Incredibles. As we walked through the isles, the idea of applying my search engine knowledge to blogs. Google does a good job of indexing blogs (they seem to hit mine daily) but I don’t care for the intermingled results you get in their text index. I’d prefer to have blogs searchable seperate from everything else.

I’m also interested in the relationship defined between blogs. Say I link to Jorge and Dena. There’s a relationship between me and Jorge, and me and Dena. Now say that Jorge links to Dena. There’s now a new relationship between Jorge and Dena, which says something (I don’t know what yet) between me and them.

I’m also working on some algorhythms that will identify common topics, so you could select to browse the technical or political categories and see relevant blogs. It will also identify trends on a timeline, so that as data is indexed, hot topics can be highlighted in realtime.

Blogs are the current big thing, it seems, even though they’ve been around for a long time. I don’t think that’s going to change much as time goes on and I think we need better ways to find the content we’re interested in reading. Maybe this will be one of them.