Searching for entrepreneur blogs: Online Techniques

As comprehensive examination preparations are now on my agenda, one of the area that I contemplate is the area of methods for locating entrepreneur blogs. While using Google Blog Search or Technorati is a no brainer to me, (as these already have developed obvious tools to locate blogs), it is essential for me at the PhD level to look into the academic theories involved in justifying the use of these tools. For this task, I have contemplated looking at the theories of Bibliometrics. One such paper that influences my thoughts about the possibility of using bibliometric techniques and methods to locate blogs of interest for my study is the paper by Vaughan, Tang, & Du (2010). Alternately, there is the paper on selective blog mining by Rubin, Burkell and Quan-Haase (2011), which does not purport to use bibliometric methods, but dubs the study as a grounded theory analysis. 

However, using some techniques for searching the Google search engine from  Vaughan, Tang, & Du (2010), I ran the following experiment. I wanted to compare Google blog search with a site search using the domains of two well known blogging platforms, Wordpress and Blogspot. I did this in order to compare the results with the Google blog search. The results (collected as of the date of this post) are as follows:



Google blog search "entrepreneur" -About 26,400,000 results (0.18 seconds)

site:wordpress.com entrepreneur- About 1,590,000 results (0.19 seconds)

site:blogspot.com entrepreneur - About 2,740,000 results (0.31 seconds)

Quantitatively the results differ. Blogspot domain search has more than Wordpress. Yet combined, both produce less than 5,000, 000 results, which is not even a fifth of the blogs retrieved using the Google Blog search. This raises the question as to what are the other domain names that Google indexes as blogs. It also raises question about how do these results differ qualitatively. These are questions that I do not intend to answer just now, but do wish to explore in the future.

References:

Rubin, V.L., Burkell, J. & Quan-Haase, A. (2011). Facets of serendipity in everyday chance encounters: A grounded theory approach to blog analysis. Information Research 16(3) paper 488. [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/16-3/paper488.html] 

Vaughan, L., Tang, J., & Du, J. (2010). Constructing business profiles based on keyword patterns on web sites. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(6), 1120-1129. doi: 10.1002/asi.21321