ReadWriteWeb

Some of you busy Facebooking, Tweeting and Plussing may not remember the time when blogging rocked the world. Not so many years ago, blogging software caused a revolution in media lead by people like Evan Williams, Dave Winer, Meg Hourihan and the Trott family.

When the number of publishers and media outlets, from the casual to the professional, exploded in the mid 2000's, many people were sure that this body of content needed to be searched differently than Google searched old fashioned web pages. Scores of blogsearch startups emerged and now almost all of them have faded away into obscurity or advertising. One stayed vibrant and innovating, though, after all these years:IceRocket. This week IceRocket found a new home at a larger company, social media monitoring firm Meltwater. Icerocket meets Meltwater seems like a story of liquefaction, but time will tell how the technology transitions into a new post-search era.

What blog search engine should you use? That depends on your needs.

In order to join a conversation, you've got to be able to find it first. Three years ago "blog search" was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs. These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below.