YungSangblr

Track Tumblr, a Tumblr Search Engine

joelaz:

I created a little tool called Track Tumblr that let’s you track Tumblr posts for a particular search term.  If you’re familiar with the “track” feature in Twitter, this is similar to that, but for Tumblr. It presents search results in reverse chronological order that you can subscribe to as a feed and track mentions of the search term over time.  Say you worked for Starbucks and wanted to know what people on Tumblr are saying about your brand.  Enter “starbucks” in Track Tumblr, and you’ll see that Jakob Lodwick and other Tumblrs mentioned them recently in various Tumblr posts.  You can subscribe to the search results as an RSS feed or on iGoogle / My Yahoo!

Previously, the best way I knew to search across all Tumblr sites was to use Google and limit search results to the tumblr.com domain.  You do that by including “site:tumblr.com” in your search.  For example, if you wanted to find posts about Starbucks, you would enter “starbucks site:tumblr.com” into Google.  The problem with that is that it missed sites like mine that are hosted on a different domain name, joelaz.com in my case.  Track Tumblr attempts to address that shortcoming by leveraging FriendFeed search.  Many people like me have added their Tumblr feed to FriendFeed, which indexes the posts and offers a way to search just within the Tumblr service.  Track Tumblr combines Google Blog Search results with Tumblr search results from FriendFeed.  That’s why it was able to find Lodwick’s Starbucks post even though he’s not using a tumblr.com domain name.  The search results won’t cover ALL Tumblrs, but they will include any posts that are indexed by EITHER Google or FriendFeed.  Hopefully, Tumblr with make this obsolete soon if & when they release their own search service.  

Till then, I hope this is helpful.  Feedback is welcome.  

Somebody has some mad Yahoo Pipes skills. Awesome work, Joe!