The current breed of Blogs & XML Feed Search Engines from Technorati, Google, Yahoo or Ask.com (Bloglines) allow you to filter blog search results either by language or you can restrict search to posts that were published during the the past three, six, or twelve month periods.But none of the popular blog search engines can help you find results filtered by country or city (i.e., the geographic location of the blogger) - You cannot limit your search to just Indian Blogs or New York Blogs.
Last month, I wrote a small trick that makes it possible to create a local blog search engine without any investment. The trick uses Technorati Country or City Tags which Bloggers can attach to their blogs and then claim their blog on Technorati. [an example]
The idea was later picked by some prominent Indian Blogs [Patrix, Kaps, DesiPundit] and today we have some 1800 blogs about India in Technorati. The blog count was around 1200 initially.
Why I am discussing the old idea again ?
A drawback of the previous method was to convince people open an account on Technorati, claim the Blog and then tag it in relevant categories. Maybe the method involved way too much effort or it was very geeky in nature.
So here's a more simple way. You don't have to open any account on Technorati or make any claims. Infact, you don't even have to visit Technorati.com to tell the blog search engine that your blogs is about India or Mumbai or New York.
Just add the following line anywhere in your Blog template. Technorati is smart enough and will automatically categorize your blog.
<a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/india" rel="tag directory">india</a>
Once you do the above step, your blog posts will appear in Technorati Search Results when someone limits the search to India. Please go ahead and tag your blogs. It will help people in discovering the great content that you are writing every day.
