Aussie bloggers look excited at the launch of gnoos, a regional blog search engine that can be configured to show results only from Australian Blogs. The existing search leader, Technorati, lets you filter results based on blog popularity or blog category but not based on the geographic location of the blogger.Gnoos is a wonderful concept and I wish, we had something similar here in India where the blogger base has been growing at a decent rate. Until that happens, here's a quick way to create a region specific blog search engine without spending any bucks.
Technorati recently introduced Blog Finder or category based search that lets your limit the search to blogs about some particular category say Shoes or Software. Now a country (or city) is no different from a category. That's the concept we'll use to create an Indian blog search engine.
Step 1 All regional bloggers must add their RSS feeds to Technorati, and claim their blogs. [Lot of bloggers may have done this already.]
Step 2 Now the important step - Members should tag their Blog on Technorati with their country and city (say, "India", "Mumbai", "Chennai", "Delhi") - You can have upto 20 tags in technorati per blog.
That's it. We have out own Local Blog Search Engine for free and it really works since it's based on Technorati. When a new blog is born in future or someone changes the feed address, remember to update the details on Technorati.
Here's a simple test - Search for Amit Agarwal on Indian Blogs
You can also test the Indian Blog search engine by clicking click here - there's a blog search button on the left sidebar. Good luck.