Here's some info I sent along to seanmeister to assist him in determining whether the Atomz search capabilities (introduced in the blog below this) can be of use to him:

These spiders run rampant if unconstrained! But I think that Atomz provides enough controls to guide a smart bomb!</p> <p>Well, here’s some of the basics: It’s free for 500 or less indexed pages. But you can create several (unlimited) less-than-500 page accounts with your free membership. And it’s really easy to move between accounts. </p> <p>Every account needs an entry point. This, by default, is the URL that you enter when setting up the account, but you can change it at: Options, Entry Point. </p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet</p> <p>The two main problems I ran into was that the spider wanted to follow the calendar navigation off into infinity and that it kept getting bounced absurdly backwards and forwards at random between the URLs on different pages for “previous 5” and “next 5”. </p> <p>So I figured that I had to deactivate the calendar navigation and the “previous 5” and “next 5” first and also any generic interest in the rest of Xanga. That left the spider just pretty much interested in just what was on the page.</p> <p>So here are the Options, URL Masks that I devised to do this:</p> <p>include http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate*<br /> exclude http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&cal*<br /> exclude regexp ^.*/*p&bflag=$<br /> exclude regexp ^.*/*n&bflag=$<br /> exclude http://www.xanga.com/*</p> <p>The order is very important! Much trial and error involved.</p> <p>With this set, I then created a public blog. With the following URLs, for example, this would allow my site to get spidered for the year 2001:</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=12%2F24%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=11%2F10%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=10%2F11%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=9%2F10%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=8%2F10%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=7%2F11%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=6%2F24%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=5%2F10%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=4%2F11%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=3%2F10%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=2%2F10%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=notforprophet&nextdate=1%2F11%2F2001&cal=1&tab=weblogs&fid=&bflag</p> <p>The key is to have one entry, and it can be any day, for each month of the year. What I surmise is that at the point that each of the above gets spidered, the pages referenced on the month’s visible calendar for that page are also spidered. So the calendar entries (but not the calendar navigation) is the key! But that’s another problem for you since your calendars are no longer visible!</p> <p>And after I was done spidering, I removed (or you could make private) the above URLs.</p> <p>For my SIR Search, I used a slightly different strategy. I first created a dummy site, copied the URLs from the left frame of:</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/Subscriptions/MySubscriptions.asp</p> <p>into a new post. I had to convert any non-Xanga.com URLs such as www.christydawn.com into their native Xanga form: http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=fairestc</p> <p>then used an Entry Point of:</p> <p>http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=dummysiteuser</p> <p>and used these URL Masks:</p> <p>exclude http://www.xanga.com/home.*&*<br /> exclude http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=dummysiteuser&cal*<br /> exclude regexp ^.*/*p&bflag=$<br /> exclude regexp ^.*/*n&bflag=$<br /> exclude http://www.xanga.com/default.asp<br /> exclude http://www.xanga.com/About*<br /> exclude http://www.xanga.com/content*<br /> exclude http://www.xanga.com/blogring*<br /> include http://www.xanga.com nofollow</p> <p>And ended, I believe, in spidering the entry pages, including the last five blogs, of my SIR! Of course, in YOUR case, …wait, your top blogs were captured too!</p> <p>So that’s it. If you peruse this and see any major gap in my logic that would result in a gap of spidering coverage, please let me know.

Now for an little insightful fun:

Over a year ago, I conducted a word-usage survey of Xanga using Xanga's search.  The problem even then was that Xanga's search would fail if "too many results" of the word returned (Oops! Too many results, please try different keywords.) --meaning you couldn't search the most popular terms/notions!

My search of my subscribers, though a select and not random sample of 605 from all of Xanga (e.g., the "Azn contingent" is severely, though not totally, under-represented), is not subject to the above constraint. Hence, it's now time for...

Our Priorities??? 

Even though this is far from scientific, a casual Search Survey of a Sample of Xanga Says:

note: these results include at least one mention of the term in the last five blogs of my subscribers plus their published profile, if displayed.

Of course, these are all yanked out of context.  And some words like *man* and *drugs* can be generic or specific.

Draw your own conclusions--or none.  All I can say is: thank God that work isn't at the top of the list!