5 great blogs covering Internet searching, search engines, and search tools for searchers, researchers and librarians.

In our Pandia Search Engine Detective collection of search engine intelligence sources we now count over 90 search engine marketing oriented blogs (!).

An alien from another planet could be led to believe that the search engines were created to serve the marketing people and not the searchers. There are not that may blogs out there that look at search engines and search tools from a searcher’s perspective.

Do not despair, though, because here are a few gems:

ResourceShelf

Some of us feared that Gary Price would abandon ResourceShelf after becoming an executive at Ask.com. Instead he gave the site a new design and continued blogging together with Shirl Kennedy and guest writers.

The blog covers the search engine industry quite extensively, but goes beyond this by including all types of high-quality web-based resources, including “databases, lists and rankings, real-time sources, and multimedia.”

Any cons? Well, the amount of information can be overwhelming. If you are looking for information about web search in particular, it helps to go directly to the web search category.

Phil Bradley

Why haven’t anyone told us about Phil Bradley? We found his blog by accident this summer, and have been regular readers since.

He presents several informative post about search engines and search tools every day, and they are not write-ups either. He has strong opinions about the tools he is covering, and his reflections are based on a long experience with the web and online search tools.

No wonder, really. He has a background as a professional librarian, discovered the Internet in 1992, and became an Internet consultant in 1996.

He has also a separate web site with articles and help pages.

ResearchBuzz

Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz is another librarian with long Internet experience. She won the Pandia Award of Honour in 2001 for her site, and continues to cover news about search engines, databases, and other information collections.

As regards what news to cover, she says: “If in doubt, the final question is, ‘Would a reference librarian find it useful?’ If the answer’s yes, in it goes.”

Obviously, this objective covers the need of any advanced information manager or researcher.

Search Engine Watch Blog

Danny Sullivan and his friends over at Search Engine Watch continue to blog on searching and search engines.

This blog covers the search scene from a search engine marketing perspective as well. However, Danny & Co do not forget the needs of searchers and researchers.

Danny Sullivan is the worlds foremost expert on the search engine industry, and this is definitely the place to find in depth industry coverage. Too bad he is leaving Search Engine Watch.

LibraryClips

LibraryClips is a Web 2.0 oriented search blog, and there are therefore more feed buttons, links, tag clouds and scripts running in the left hand column of this blog than anywhere else in the universe (many of them are very useful, though, and serve as a repository for such services).

The blogger, John Tropea, says that “Like most people I’m interested in blogs, rss, social bookmarks, wiki’s, etc, so I’ll use this site to ask questions and discuss ideas about these topics and wish list features.”

There is extensive coverage of tools that makes it easier to organize your life as a web based researcher.

We have one suggestion, and that is for Tropea to stop printing the whole blog entry on the blog home page, as this makes the blog slow to load and harder to navigate.

Pandia Search Engine Detective has more links to library and research related blogs and sites (right hand column).