Notey is a new topic-focused blog finding directory. Yeah, I know… but it just reportedly raised $1.6 million in funding.

It has a slick iPad-focussed design, so on a widescreen desktop PC I hit some clunky navigation points a few times. Top of the ‘recent blog posts’ pile on entering was “40+ Insanely Clever Products Your Dog Deserves To Own”, which suggests the marketeers are already in Notey, via marketeering blog-a-zine articles.

The search box is hidden away, as if they’re ashamed of it. The search experience is not great. I searched for “Lovecraft” (H.P. Lovecraft, famous horror and SF author, on whose life I’m an expert) and the results were incredibly poor. A Google search for…

site:http://www.notey.com/blogs/ lovecraft

… reveals more of the semantic messiness, and the ways that the database is being skewed by the vast cloud of fanboy crapware that now surrounds the man and his fiction.

Sadly Notey doesn’t look like the new Technorati to me, and nor is it of much used to academics seeking a specialist single-topic blog. For discovery of single-topic blogs Google is still your friend, and the following Google Search modifier still works despite Google having abandoned a dedicated blog search box…

inblogtitle:keyword

Update: October 2018. It appears that inblogtitle:keyword is no longer useful, as it now returns only 10 irrelevant results when used with Lovecraft.