About Cruising Blog Search
One billion new pages are added to the internet
each day!! If you've ever tried searching for sailing/cruising blogs you know that it is difficult to find the detailed information you are looking for (positions, maps etc).
There are 1000's of personal sailing blogs/websites that contain great information so we built a search engine
dedicated to Personal Cruising Blogs.
Been There .. Done That
Nothing beats a first hand account of an area by fellow cruisers. During our 5.5+ year 33,000 mile sailing trip, we discovered that the most relevant information is usually passed on by fellow cruisers. We followed blogs of those a season (or two) ahead of us to get a rough idea of anchorages, timing, issues and cool areas to visit. From the beginning we added our blog's position (see
our Sailing Blog) and kept improving our mapping abilities as our trip continued.
We get frequent praise on the helpfulness of our
maps and Google Earth files, and we even released
BlurbBits to help map blogs and photos to help make life simplier while you are traveling.
Search technology
We manage the sites the Cruising Blog search indexes using search engine technology built by
Google. In the future we
may change the search rankings based on the extra data provided for other cruisers. Helpful information includes:
- Lat/Lng Position with optional depth, bottom type and notes (protection, swell etc)
These positions allow us to map your blog posts (if you have a RSS feed).
- Fun Things to do/Siteseeing Details
- Money/Provisions
- Formalities
- Internet access (if available)
Note: We are not looking for a book, just some quick notes while they are fresh in your mind.
Benefits
We hope this targeted search will bring cruisers together, sharing first hand up-to-date information through the blogs they already write. Adding consistent Lat,Lng data to the blog text will allow us to search and map blog posts adding valuable resources for both the reader and the blog authors. In addition, CBS blogs should see increased traffic from cruisers or armchair sailors searching specifically for cruising blogs and not just stumbling upon them by accident. If you are adding your blog posts via email it should be easy to look across the chart table and add the accurate position from the GPS. If you are NOT blogging via email, check out the
FREE options.
Occasionally blog posts may be featured on our
Community Blog and
Facebook fan page. A small text snippet and photograph may be used with proper attribution including a link to the original blog post and blog posts may be mapped if data is available. We hope to add additional features (blog lists, maps, geo-tagged photos etc) as the number of indexed blogs increases.
Mapping: Finding a Needle in a haystack
Searching for mappable locations using a text based search engine is extremely difficult because there is no pattern matching. Our
lat/lng text format makes it
easier to find the position information which MUST appear in the search summary in order to be mapped. Our example map search uses llz= OR position to find the relevent text.
Google's Search indexing is delayed (based on site activity) and new additions you've made may not appear in the search results for days/weeks. If you run your own site make sure you checkout
Google's webmaster guides. BlurbBits
dynamic geoblog maps and
extracted data maps use pattern matching and the results can be mapped much quicker.
Comments
For site comments or questions please use the site comments page.Comments by Disqus