In general I don't turn to blogs for news, or do blog searches for information, but for the sake of being a good sport, I tried searching for some info about an artist I like named Barry McGee on Technorati, BlogPulse, and BlogCatalog.
Technorati only yielded 7 posts, all about a recent mural McGee did on Houston Street in New York City (which I had already read about thanks to a friend posting about it on Facebook). I thought it was strange that the results didn't go any further (perhaps has something to do with the "authority rating" of the posts?). It felt like I was being blocked somehow.
The results on BlogPulse went much deeper (965 results, some in foreign languages), but there was no easy way to dig back to the older posts. The recent posts (all made within the past few weeks) were all about the same mural in New York.
A search on BlogCatalog came up with posts about a joint gallery show between McGee and Clare Rojas back at the start of the summer, which I had not heard about and was glad to see some images. There were also some results about the mural. Some results were fully unrelated ("Inspirational Country Music Award Nominees"). Unlike BlogPulse or Technorati there were no dates listed with the results. The only way I could find out when the post was from was actually clicking on the link and reading the post, so that was a bit inconvenient.
I don't generally seek out new blogs or news via blogs using a blog search. I think it's awkward and inconvenient and at this point a normal search engine will direct you to just as many if not more blogs with relevant posts. I do suppose it's an effective way to search if you're only interested in the very latest posts about something you're interested in, or if you're doing a really broad search for blogs about "cooking" or "movies" or something. Even so, a regular search engine can do this!
I come across blogs more organically in general, via suggestions from friends or links that come up on blogs I already read. Once again, I'll talk more about my info-gathering habits more when I talk about RSS.
For actual "news" news, I stick with the BBC's website and the sites for local papers.
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