Ever since I started blogging, I’ve been trying to think up ways to create connectivity between other real estate and mortgage blogs. Everyone has a blogroll, but I was looking for something more dynamic. After reading Hanin Levin’s attempts to document new real estate bloggers, I built a clunky list at reblog.mariah.com. That was ok, but not very user friendly. My second attempt was a site called rembex. It was basically the same situation, a gussied up blogroll. Great for SEO among bloggers, but not very useful otherwise.

I also maintain a huge list of links for the mortgage Industry called the Big List. In the past, I attempted to build my own search engine to organize the list, but it failed miserably.

A couple days ago, I stumbled across a solution to both dilemmas. Google Co-op now offers custom search engines that can configured to run only the sites the publisher chooses. I took me no time to put my Mortgage Search Engine idea into action. However, about half way into the project, I realized that this was the solution to creating better blog connectivity as well.

After a couple sleepless nights, my second search engine is up and running as well.

REMBEX.com, the real estate & mortgage blog search engine. Basically I collected 250 active, relevant blogs, plus all of the blogs on activerain.com (a network of real estate bloggers), and input them into the engine. Google Co-op searches only these sites.

This engine bridges the gap between searching each blog individually, and using a more global search engine like Technorati or Google Blog Search. Those bigger engines can be useful, but I’ve found that they don’t differentiate between dedicated realty bloggers and anyone with a blog, that happens to mention real estate. The big search engines also tend to bring up results from sploggers or almost any site that uses RSS feeds.

Google Co-op also provides the ability to refine searches. I built the refinements so that you can search from a group of blogs. The groups are based on industry leading blogs, and the personal blogs of the it’s contributors. For instance, refining your results to “Rain City” will filter the search to the Rain City Blog, plus Ardell’s Personal Blog, Dustin’s Move.com Blog and so on.

I feel like the result is a tool that can be used both by consumers and other bloggers to find a local blogger, or see what the entire industry has to say about a particular subject. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.