The Microcap Speculator

Financial Blog Search is now one week old, and the response has been overwhelming. Though building the custom search engine only took an evening and cost all of $10 (for the domain name), it has generated over 2,000 searches plus several blog mentions and links. Thanks to all who wrote about it, linked, or sent encouraging emails. Curious to see what your peers are looking for? Here are the top search terms:

1. forex
2. forex blogs
3. trading
4. nvda
5. msft
6. options trading
7. forex personal blogs
8. aapl
9. apple
10. subprime
11. goog
12. day trading
13. making money from home
14. trading earnings
15. amibroker
16. monsanto
17. csco
18. quantitative
19. trader mike
20. long term trading
21. emini
22. trading stocks
23. qqqq
24. russell
25. bloomberg

The sample is still too small to be significant, but it does show a few things. First, more users are interested in forex than I anticipated. Second, these searches in the aggregate are less than 8% of all queries, confirming that financial blog readers have a “long tail” of varied interests. Third, many of the terms appear to be highly-ranked not because a lot of users all thought to type in the same three or four word combination, but because Google counts each page of results viewed as a separate query. In other words, users are looking deep into the search results to find the information they need (yet another reason to ignore the hype of the SEO hucksters promising to get you a first or second place for a given keyword).

Unfortunately, I did come across a flaw in Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) that is preventing one relevant blog from showing up in the results. I think I have zeroed in on the problem, relating to how Google CSE treats domain redirects, but I have yet to get anything approaching a solution from the Mountain View crew. Hopefully that will be straightened out soon.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

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Traditional blog search engines are great, if you are searching for a splog (spam weblog). But if you are trying to find a nugget of insight from a financial blog, they will leave you disappointed.

That’s a big problem for someone like me — an avid reader of blogs with a short memory. As an interim solution, I have been using Google Reader’s search function to locate articles from my subscribed feeds. That works ok, but only on the 20 or so stock blogs that I read every day.

Unable to find a suitable existing solution, I created Financial Blog Search. Its a simple custom search engine, built using Google CSE, that will search about 120 financial blogs that I hand-selected for any term you desire. Best of all…no splogs.

Give it a try by visiting the homepage or by typing a query in the search box in the right sidebar. So far I am very pleased with the results. I use it mostly to see what other bloggers are writing about a given stock. For example, here are the top results for “MSFT”:

I hope you find it useful too. If you do, feel free to add it to your website using this code:

<!-- Google CSE Search Box Begins -->
<form action="http://www.google.com/cse" id="searchbox_003769670076142430872:jskdo-el3lu">
<input type="hidden" name="cx" value="003769670076142430872:jskdo-el3lu" />
<input type="text" name="q" size="25" />
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
</form>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=searchbox_003769670076142430872%3Ajskdo-el3lu?=en"></script>
<!-- Google CSE Search Box Ends -->

Adjusting the “size” parameter will give you a bigger or smaller search box. For more options, you can create a custom Google gadget for Financial Blog Search or add Financial Blog Search to your iGoogle page.

If you think there is a site I should add to the search engine, or one that should be deleted, please email me. Thanks.

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