Seems like I can't open a newsreader these days without tripping over a post about blog search. Here's another offering in the, uh, offing — Steve Rubel reports on the private beta of CustomSearch Personal, which is geared towards PR folk but Steve says anyone tracking topics (are there any of you *not* tracking topics?) might find this useful. Their database includes "the most influential" blogs (potentially problematic, as we know), plus a number of mainstream news outlets in the U.S. and internationally, plus government and policy web sites. It sounds like you can work up a fairly complex search without having to know all the tricks of the Boolean advanced search trade. There'll be a free version and a paid version, the latter of which will net you unlimited keywords, bells and whistles, etc.
