As good as google is, searching for a specific blog post amongst the millions of pages indexed by their service often results in not finding what one is looking for. The problem is that the one blog entry of interest is swamped by the sheer number of web pages that contain the same search terms.
For example, I found it impossible to find the blog entry that mentioned a certain Peet’s tea. I wanted to try this tea, but hadn’t bookmarked the page, and didn’t remember where I had read the entry. Searching google found many, many entries related to Peet’s and tea, but not the particular posting I was looking for.
Enter Dave Sifry’s blog search tool, which indexes approximately 300,000 blogs every couple of hours. My search for “peet’s tea” returned only a few results, and it was very easy to find the right article amongst that small set.