I tried my first search on Technorati, Google Blog Search, BlogPulse, and Bloglines.

Unfortunately I was underwhelmed by all four, most likely because of the search terms (”inauguration booklist”).

Technorati returned three results, all of them irrelevant.  Google Blog Search returned 3,737 results, and of the first 10 only one was relevant.  BlogPulse returned 13 results, but the vast majority appeared to be accidentally relevant: links to reviews of the children’s book If I Ran for President, on sites which seem almost certainly to be spam bolstered with scraped content.   Bloglines returned 18 results, most of which were also irrelevant, and only two of which might have been useful with a broader political context.

So I tried the search again, this time with a term that I thought would turn up more results: “graphic novel.”

Technorati performed better on this one, though one of the hits was for a post which simply had the two words in it, not together and not on comics, and the others were mostly for breaking news on casting in various movies (which, frankly, doesn’t interest me much). Google Blog Search did better yet, at least on its first page of results, and some of the blog posts linked were actually fascinating. I was also interested to see a post in Dutch in the first 10 results. The top hit on BlogPulse was for a site in German; another was in Italian. Most of them were relevant (and also interesting) though two just had the two words on the same page, not as the phrase. Bloglines’ results on this query were fairly spotty, returning one comment on a post, one forum post, and a very brief and uninformative post about Watchmen.

Of all of those, I don’t see any clear leader, though I’m unimpressed with the abundance of identical content on BlogPulse and won’t be using it much more.  Technorati’s focus on the “now” means it should be good for the kinds of search where you need to know what the most recent activity is and not so good for the kinds of search where you’re interested in meatier content.  If I continue with Google Blog Search and Bloglines it’s probably just because I’m already familiar with their service.