As new search engines grace the web world at such a fast rate these days, it's hard for fledgling search engines to make an impression on the billions of web-surfers who ride the Internet waves - unless they do something a little different. IceRocket.com is a blog search engine that, as well as a search facility, provides many tools for bloggers and blog-readers. IceRocket allows users to search through fairly standard things like news and images, but also has a search option dedicated to MySpace and blogs, the main focus of their site. Bloggers are well catered for by the site and it is clear that IceRocket has been designed with the common blogger in mind. After every search a drop down menu is provided at the top of the page, which can be used to subscribe to a feed of the search results in various online blog readers, and a "Share" menu allows a link to be posted to Facebook, Digg or Newsvine. IceRocket also provides a free RSS Builder that is great for bloggers who are just starting out and will allow them to syndicate their feeds in the standard format for distributing online news. A free 'Blog Tracker' is also available so users can see how popular their blog is at present and over time.
IceRocket also offer a whole host of other blog-related tools that bloggers and other interested parties can put to good use. The main blog search can be modified to search for blogs that link to your site, as well as author-specified topics, or - as they are called in the blogging world - 'tags'.
The Blog Tools section of the site reveals a whole host of other trend-analysing applications. One of the most interesting tools is the Blog Trend graph maker. With this tool users can specify a keyword, search blogs to see which keyword has been creating more buzz and tailor their topics as such.
More well-implemented features are the Top Videos, Top Movies and Top News pages, which IceRocket compiles by trawling blog-links to online video sharing sites, such as YouTube and Google Video for videos, IMDb for movies and major official news sources for news.
As IceRocket grows it should become even more useful as it trawls more blogs and its web presence becomes more established. The site looks to be heading in the right direction for bloggers and blog readers and by providing and adding to these tools they may soon become the 'one-stop-search-shop' for which many writers in the blog world are desperately looking.
